Legends
by Abandon Structure
Summary: Vampires, demigods, shifters, witches, and fates. Oh, and lets not forget the end of the world. This is what happens when Legends walk the earth.
1. Chapter 1

"In the long run, we're all dead, so why not live a little?" Ginny Weasley's logic was impeccable, as always, but that didn't make Diana Whitmore feel any better. Usually the downside to her friends logic never occurred to her until after they were in the Headmaster's office.

If he had a penny for every time he'd heard one of them say, 'Well, sir, it _seemed_ like a good idea at the time…' he'd have more than enough to buy Snape a decent shampoo and conditioner set. For the rest of his life.

"This whole unconscious competition thing you have with the twins is definitely a sign of failing mental health," she finally settled for whispering before crouching next to her friend outside the Slytherin's compartment.

"You have to have had mental health in order to have failing mental health. Thankfully, I have neither."

It was unlikely she had a brain, either, with what she was planning.

Messing with Slytherin's was always a bad idea. Messing with Slytherin Royalty?

"Well, mate, it was nice knowing you," clapping her best mate on the shoulder, Di peered around the corner, acting the part of a lookout.

"Any sign of the Prefects?"

"Nope. Coast is clear. No witnesses for our death."

"You're being overdramatic," Ginny scoffed, wand at the ready. "They're not going to really kill us."

Di regarded her slightly delusional friend with the deepest look of concern.

"Ginny, dear, you do remember that nasty shrinking incident in fourth year, right? You remember, when Parker Graham accidentally dumped boil remover on Pansy Parkinson's robes? And how for almost a month afterwards Parker was singing soprano because somebody mysteriously managed to relocate his testicles?"

"And now he has a nasty habit of public masturbation," Ginny finished, chewing on her bottom lip as she contemplated the all too real threat of losing 'the girls' should they be caught.

"Poor chap," Di clucked sympathetically. "Never gonna amount to much now."

It was true. Parker had been held back twice for fondling himself as opposed to actually taking his OWLs.

"He could always have a career in the porn industry," Di murmured, more to herself than anybody. Ginny snorted.

"Trust me. Without a few engorgement charms and some serious cosmetic work, nobody's gonna wanna see Junior up close and personal."

"You've seen him…"

"Who hasn't?" Ginny shrugged a shoulder dismissively before turning her attention back to the compartment door they'd been covertly watching for the past twenty minutes.

"You know the plan?"

"I know the plan." Fat lot of good it was going to do them. The occupants of the compartment in question had the wizarding equivalent of a Harvard Education in Bad Assery. Di was almost positive they were going to get caught.

Still, better to go down in a blaze of glory than to…actually, dying didn't really seem like that great of a plan.

Di had a clear moment of thought, you know, one of those 'what the _hell_ am I doing?' moments, which she was quickly yanked out of by Ginny's sudden forward motion.

"Come _on_," Ginny grunted, inching her way along the wall. "The Prefect is going to be heading this way any second now."

Having never been a Prefect herself, Di was going to have to trust Ginny's judgment. Granted, one semester wasn't exactly a shining star, but to be frank, Dumbledore really hadn't had a choice but to revoke the position seeing as Ginny had a tendency to blatantly abuse her privileges.

"What's the point in having a shiny badge if you can't stab people with it every once in a while?" Had been her philosophy.

Di gave serious thoughts to switching up her best mates, but peering at Ginny's hunched shoulders and listening to her barely audible footsteps, she was forced to acknowledge that none of the other candidates were as interesting as Ginevra Weasley.

"Ready?" Ginny motioned Di up on the other side of the compartment door.

"I was born ready," Di shot back with a quick grin, her grip on her wand tightening and loosening as adrenaline flooded through her.

"On the count of three. One…two…" Ginny was on her feet, throwing the compartment door open and holding her wand in the most menacing fashion possible as she prepared to deliver her fear inspiring speech of impending doom…

"Hey!" Di protested, coming to her feet next to her best friend, a look of supreme annoyance on her face. "What happened to three?"

* * *

Contrary to popular belief, Slytherin's don't perform ritual sacrifices on the ride to Hogwarts.

For the most part, they slept, ate, talked, played games…you know, normal kid things.

Well, save for the abnormal amount of betting that took place.

"You cheated." Blaise Zabini arched an eyebrow while Draco Malfoy rolled his eyes.

"How do you cheat at Exploding Snaps?" Pansy Parkinson asked, mystified by the very thought. "They explode, you lose. Simple as that."

"Then how come he always wins?" Daphne pointed out with a slight pout.

"Quite whining, Greengrass, and pay up." Daphne narrowed her eyes as her hand dipped into her pocket, pulling out the ten galleons she owed him. Reaching out she hesitated before putting them in his palm, waiting for him to meet her eyes before issuing her challenge.

"One day, I will find out your secret. And then…" she trailed off ominously earning her another eye roll, this time from Blaise himself.

"I can't help it if I'm naturally superior to you," was all he said, gracefully depositing his newfound wealth in his own pocket.

"Either that or you're cheating," Pansy stated, completely going against her previous defense of him. Eyeing her with the patented male look of mystification at the female mind, Blaise turned to share the look with Draco, who merely arched an eyebrow in response.

"I've resigned myself to never fully comprehending how Pansy's mind works," was all he said by way of explanation.

"It would take several lifetimes for anyone to fully comprehend myself. For you, though, it'd take several millennia."

"Hah," Draco mumbled, settling back in the bench and folding his hands across his stomach as he stared at his dark haired semi-nemesis kiddie corner to him. "Don't flatter yourself. You're not _that _complicated."

"Draco, my dear, it has less to do with my complexity than with your density. If it wasn't for Blaise showing you the finer points of seduction, you'd still be a virgin."

"Hey!" Taking a shot at Draco's masculine pride was a surefire way to get a response out of the somewhat snarky blonde. "You leave my sex life out of this!"

"What sex life?" was the immediate response from the other three occupants of the compartment.

The three of them were still grinning over this while Draco sulked when their compartment door went flying open.

The apparition in the doorway was decked out in black robes, head to toe, with a bone mask over the face to effectively imitate the terrifying figure of a Death Eater.

Whoever it was did a pretty good job. For about five seconds Blaise's heart was in the vicinity of his throat until he noticed the nail polish.

It was pink, chipped, and way too girly for any of the five female Death Eater's that he knew of.

The sneakers didn't really help either.

It took all of three seconds for his brain to process all of this, during which time another figure popped up next to the first.

No nail polish, and the shoes were definitely an improvement. Some sort of boot this time.

Blaise could almost believe this one was the real deal until the figure spoke.

"Hey!" It exclaimed, hands on hips, posture and voice the very picture of indignation. "What happened to three?"

"Di-_on't _ruin the moment, _minion_," the first figure hissed to the second.

"How come I'm always the minion?" the second figure shot back.

"Because you're the one who always ruins the plan!" The first figure turned to face the second, hands up high as she, cause really, it had to be female with that nail polish, waved them over her head to make her point.

"It was a stupid plan to begin with!" The second figure shot back, stomping her foot (dead give away as to her gender), and slamming her curled fists against her hips as the two of them glared at each other.

Which was pretty funny since they were both wearing masks that covered their faces.

"It was not a stupid plan! You take that back!" Figure One slammed a bony finger into Figure Twos chest.

"Ow! My boob! Damnit it Gi-_nius_ _master of mine_. That fucking hurt!"

"I'll show you fucking hurt!" Figure One lunged at Figure Two, who met her head on, letting on a very Tarzanesque yell as the two proceeded into some sort of mortal combat in the Slytherin compartment.

Draco stared, completely mystified, as two squirming figures suddenly fell at his feet. When he'd silently wished to have females dropping at his feet, this wasn't quite what he had in mind.

"Take it back!" Figure One had Figure Two in an impressive headlock, but Figure Two had somehow managed to latch on to Figure One's leg, resulting in a sort of hopping wrestling match.

"Apologize first!" Came the gritted response.

"Fine! On the count of three?"

"You're three or my three?" was the oddly civil response.

"Mine. One…two…"

"_Puniceasuabeo!_" The two girls yelled in tandem, their wands pointed at separate targets.

Blaise felt the spell go through his personal shields, his expression akin to shock.

That wasn't supposed to be possible. _Nothing _was supposed to get through his shields unless he let it. His father had assured him of that before he'd left.

"Bloody hell!" Draco was staring at him with something akin to horror on his face, the horror multiplying as he reached up and tugged a lock of hair down.

An alarmingly brightly colored _purple _lock of hair.

"You're bloody dead!" He snarled, going for his wand and diving out the door after the two fleeing figures, Blaise, the only other one hit by the spell, only half a step behind him.

"You take left, I'll take right," Draco ordered, already racing after his chosen target.

* * *

Nobody could accuse her of freezing up in the moment, Di thought, oddly proud of their little improvised scene.

Granted, when Ginny had poked her chest it had really hurt, but, still, all was fair in friendship and pranks…

Racing down the train, she quickly yanked off the mask and the robes, lest some poor sprog duck out of their compartment and meet with the shock of their life.

Holding them under one arm and pumping the other to gain momentum, she dared not risk even a glance over her shoulder as she raced through another car.

"You can't run forever!" came the terse half-yell behind her.

"Watch me!" She shot back, the very picture of defiance until, she realized with a glance, that he was right. Unless she wanted to taking a running leap off the back of the train, she was somewhat limited in her options.

Still, she never was one to make things _easy _on her opponent.

Reaching the end of the next car, she paused for a second, peering for a hiding spot when two arms slammed down on either side of her without so much as a warning sound of a door opening.

"Ho- Oh Holy _shit!_" She breathed, staring in wide eyed wondered at the grey-eyed boy glaring menacingly down at her. With a shock of bright purple hair very nicely styled on top of his head.

Her mother had always warned her about poking at an angry tiger, but Merlin, he looked so funny…

"Are you _laughing _at me?" The great and feared Draco Malfoy was used to being, well, feared by his peers. He was used to deference, respect, and a little bit of awe. He was not in the least used to someone _laughing _in the face of one of his threats, or in his face itself for that matter.

"I can't help it," the chit in front of him replied with a giggle and a quirky grin that drew his eyes almost immediately to her mouth. "You look so…."

"So, what?" He growled, waiting for her to tell him something like 'threatening' or 'masculine' or 'powerful' or some other equally manly adjective.

"_Cute_!" She barked out around a gale of laughter. "You're adorable!"

Draco gritted his teeth against her amusement, narrowing his eyes in his most threatening manner until the trollop obediently halted her laughter. But that quirky smile was still there.

"You must have a death wish," he finally stated, his cool all but shattered, first by the hair, then by her laughter and those lips…

"On the contrary," the chit smiled wider, staring up at him with earnesty. "I happen to have a life wish."

"A life wish?" His eyebrows, also a glaringly bright fuchsia blend, shot up as he stared down at her with a mixture of confusion and hostile admiration. "What the bloody hell is that?"

"It means, Mr. Malfoy, that dying is easy," Di smiled up at him. "You don't need to waste any wishes on _that. _Life, on the other hand, is definitely wish worthy."

Draco stared down at her.

"You're a barmy little bird, aren't you?"

"I prefer the term creative thinker. It sounds like something you could put on your resume, doesn't it?"

"I have to punish you." Draco knew this. As a Malfoy, he couldn't let this…prank tarnish the family honor. As himself, though, he kind of wanted to keep her around, sort of like a mascot, or something. His eyes dipped to her lips once more.

"Alright," Di tilted her head back and stared up at him, her spin rigid with defiance, her eyes alight with glee and bravery, with a hint of kamikaze resignation. "Do your worst."

Draco never could resist a challenge.

* * *

Ginny let out a whoop of glee as she darted through another car, tossing her costume in the nearest loo as she continued on her mad dash away from her latest victims.

She'd gotten pretty good at this part of pranking people. When Fred and George had taken her under their wings way back in second year, the first thing they'd had her do was wind sprints.

"You….just…want…to….torture me," she'd gasped out after the first set as she lay wheezing in the short grass just outside the Burrow.

"On the contrary"

"my dear Ginny. We're actually"

"trying to help you. If we'd"

"been faster in"

"our youth"

"Mum"

"wouldn't have"

"caught us"

"nearly as much."

"Torturing you is just a bonus," they'd finished in tandem. Tiny, precocious, _lady-like _Ginny had flipped them the bird before climbing to her feet and repeating the whole torture again because, as much as she hated to admit it, they had a valid point.

When executing a prank that may or may not work, it was always a good idea to be able to run as fast as possible _away _from the scene of the crime/explosion.

Glancing over her shoulder at her pursuer, she fought the urge to yelp even as his eyes widened in startled recognition.

She'd hoped that Draco would be the one racing after her since, after all, he was a Malfoy and she was a Weasley and it was written in the stars, or possibly on paper somewhere, that the two families were destined to torment each other until the end of time or some other tosh like that.

What she'd failed to consider was the disguise doing its job and, well, _disguising _her from becoming the blonde's target, but also that he'd go the _other _way.

_Poor Di_, she had time to think before reaching for yet another door, only to find herself slamming forward, a surprisingly fit male body flattening against her.

"Weasley," he breathed, his heart beat somewhat elevated, and his anger almost palatable as he reached around and grabbed her wrists, imprisoning her hands before she could do anything creative like, say, go for her wand.

"Zabini," she tried to imitate his irritated tone, but couldn't keep the note of humor out, causing him to snarl as he whirled her around before pushing her back against the door.

"Weasley," he repeated, staring down at her, his expression suddenly relaxing despite the solidity of his grip. "You have a real set of brass one's."

"I prefer silver, or at the very least, gold," she replied, one eyebrow arched in snarky retaliation. "I think that we put on a rather award winning performance, after all."

Blaise Zabini was not a man of many words. His basic philosophy was summed up along the lines of 'why complete a sentence when one word will do?'. It annoyed his Professors and amused his friends, since delivering a cutdown in a single word was a skill Zabini had perfected back in third year.

Right now, though, he couldn't think of a single word to sum up in equal parts his admiration (because, really, it took guts to pull off a stunt like that and while Zabini was a Slytherin, through and through, and hellbent on getting revenge, he was a big enough aficionado of pranks to admire the complexity and simplicity of her prank) and aggravation with her, so he settled on the universal cure-all, so to speak.

"Bollocks."

"No thanks," was her chirped reply. "I've seen where they've been. Morag McDougal? Seriously? What on earth could possess a man to look past that hideous mole long enough to shag the rest of her?"

Blaise fought the urge to point on to her that the mole was on the front of Morag's face and that not every sexual position actually required you to be _facing _your partner, but he highly doubted that the colossus that Ron Weasley had recently morphed into would appreciate having a Zabini educate his baby sister on the birds and the bees and the different positions thereof.

As wrapped up in his own line of thought as he was, Zabini had been trained to keep his guard up and to be aware of his surroundings, so the sly look of comprehension in Miss Ginevra Weasley's face did not escape his notice.

_The little chit was playing him!_

"Nice try, Weasley." He felt his own grin slide into place at the flash of fear in her eyes before she tilted her head back and flexed her still imprisoned hands, her eyes on his, Snitch-quick calculation gleaming in those eyes.

"Tell you what," she finally stated after a few more moments of silence. "You let me go, and I'll…"

She trailed off, caught by the sudden heat in his eyes.

Ginny wasn't exactly a blushing virgin. Well, she _was_ a virgin, but she'd done enough and knew enough to recognize that gleam in a man's eyes.

She saw it with her Dad whenever he looked at her Mum, with her Uncle Bors whenever he looked at his wife, Tina, and with Filch, whenever he was told, every April Fools Day, to break out the whips and chains for a celebration.

That look in a man's eyes meant one thing and one thing only.

"You'll what?" Blaise all but purred, recognizing the recognition in her eyes as he leaned forward every so slightly invading her space.

She pushed back against the car door, instinctively trying to get away from him, a process hindered by his body effectively pinning her in place and quickly closing the distance.

"Oh, no you don't," Ginny opened her mouth, loathe to let this…this…this _Slytherin_ best her, and it was all the invitation Blaise needed.

She'd had her fair share of kisses from a variety of persons over the years. Well, four, if you counted Billy Whigham's hasty peck way back in primary school. There'd been Michael Corner at the end of fourth year, Dean in the middle of fifth, and the unfortunate debacle with Harry over the summer.

Kissing Michael had been…nice. Uninspiring, but decent enough. She'd heard horror stories from her roommates about excessive saliva production and drooling, but they'd managed to get along fine.

Kissing Dean had been a bit better, more interesting. They'd had more in common than she and Corner, and he'd made her laugh, which was always a good thing. They'd had some steamy kisses and some heavy petting, but nothing Ginny would classify as mind blowing.

Harry's kiss had been…awkward, to say the least. Having spent the summer at the Burrow, he'd been hanging around a lot and, since Ron was understandably distracted by Hermione, they'd ended up hanging with each other a lot.

An awful lot.

Kissing him had been a complete and total accident. She'd been getting some of Fred and George's old supplies from the attic, the one's they'd used for pranking that Mum had obviously forgotten about, when she'd turned around and ran right into him.

They'd landed in a heap, with Ginny landing on top of him, knocking the wind out of both of them.

It had been one of those pure romantic moments, you know the one's where it's like 'and their lips met and stars exploded' only in their case it was more along the lines of 'and their teeth clacked, sending sharp pain through each other theirs head, which was swiftly accompanied by the mental pain of having connected lips with someone you now recognized as a pseudo-sibling.'

Between the two of them they'd gone through a tube of toothpaste.

"We're never going to ever mention this moment again," Harry had informed her conversationally as he used his finger to deposit another dollop of Crest before passing the tube to her.

"Never again," she'd agreed, forgoing the finger and squeezing the tube directly in her mouth.

Kissing Zabini…

Tiny little explosions all over. Behind her eyelids, in her fingers, all the way down to her toes and everywhere in between.

And they weren't even using tongues.

Eyes closed, her other senses kicked into overdrive.

She could smell him, his cologne and underneath it, the smell of his skin, warm and sweet, like dusky chocolate on a warm summer night. She could hear her heartbeat, racing in her chest, and, with another breath, his racing in time with her own.

His skin felt like velvet, his hair like silk. She was a tornado of sensations and, through it all, she could _see_ things falling into place.

It was like being caught in a dream. She saw him, she saw herself, and she saw the thinnest of cords stretching from her chest and burying itself in his, connecting them for now and ever.

It was that thought that had her yanking her head back and opening her eyes, her blue orbs meeting his brown, both sets wide with startled recognition of something neither of them could quite define.

"What the bloody hell?" Ginny had her wand out and aimed, Blaise whirling to place his body between her and the intruder, his own wand in a fighters position.

As one, they attacked.

* * *

Challenging Draco Malfoy had been a Bad Idea.

"What the hell-?" Di tried to jerk back the second she felt his lips touch the side of her neck, but it didn't do her a whole hell of a lot of good, seeing as he had her effectively pinned against the car door.

"Stop that!" She ordered, but without any real heat and with a very real hint of laughter.

"Never," came the somewhat mumbled reply as Draco went back to licking and nipping at her neck.

"It tickles, you bastard!" Di laughed and reached up to try and pry his head away, but before she could so much as tug, he let out a low, all too real, all too warning, growl, that had her hesitating, humor dissipating.

"Draco? Malfoy? Dude?" Another low growl was her answer.

Glancing down, she caught Draco's eye. The depths of grey seemed to have taken on a somewhat odd sheen, leaving her caught in their light like a freakin' bug drawn to a bug zapper.

Meeting her gaze, Draco made a show of letting his tongue dart out of his mouth not once, not twice, but three times against the stretch of skin that was the object of his current fascination.

And then he bit her.

"MOTHERFUC-!" Di all but roared as she felt his teeth pierce the skin. His hand came up, covering her mouth before she could finish the exclamation and she quickly returned the favor, biting down on his palm as good as she could considering she had crappy leverage and was in pain.

Still sucking at her neck like some sort of vampire, Draco let out a low, rumbling noise that Di mistook for a growl for about five seconds before realizing the nippy bastard was laughing. She muttered another expletive behind his hand, scowling down at him.

"Well, isn't this a lovely sight," came a female voice from the other end of the car. Having just entered, Di hadn't had time to spot her and warn Draco, which probably would have been a good thing, since Draco, like most members of dark pureblood families, did not like it when people snuck up on him.

The poor girl.

* * *

Having spent her fair share of time in the Headmaster's office since beginning her friendship with the irritating, though ingenious, chit named Ginny Weasley, Di wasn't particularly alarmed to find herself occupying her favorite chair, with her best mate at her side.

The two boys were a worrying addition, though.

Granted, Harry and Ron had spent their fair share of time up here. And there had been numerous temporary accomplices who'd failed to adhere to Ginny's 'Run Fast, Run Far' philosophy when it came to getting away, but this was the first time Di could recall having the victims present.

Though after what he put her through, Di was starting to feel a bit victimized herself.

"We already tried that," Ginny murmured from her left side. "The Death Glare still doesn't work."

"You never know," Di replied, crossing her arms and sulking as the annoying prat arched an eyebrow and stared smugly back at her.

She was dying to ask Ginny how she'd been caught, but Ginny had yet to look away from the delectable Blaise Zabini long enough to carry on a private conversation.

Though the swollen lips and dazed expression she'd still worn when Professor Snape dragged her in here and deposited her on the chair pretty much said it all.

Di's hand unconsciously drifted up to her neck, pressing against the bruised skin there, her dark expression intensifying. Draco watched the gesture, something akin to male pride on his face and something that suspiciously resembled possessiveness.

It was, to say the least, alarming. To say the most: no way in hell was he ever touching her again.

Besides, like it took skill to leave a hickey. Di let her hand drop back to her lap, scowl in place as she flipped him off, not that he seemed to care.

"Wanker," she grumbled under her breath but just loud enough for him to hear.

His grey eyes flashed before his lids lowered and he stared at her with bedroom eyes.

"Hussy," he shot back, voice a low purring caress to her senses. Di's eyes widened in alarm and she reached out to grab Ginny's hand, self-preservation instinct overriding her desire to appear tough and unaffected.

"Ginny," much to her embarrassed dismay, her voice squeaked on the single word.

"It's okay," Ginny struggled to reassure her, eyes never leaving the stoic faced Zabini. "They try it again and we can always kill them and claim it was self-defense."

"Why kill them?" One of the portraits on the wall murmured, his eyes following the byplay with interest. "There are so many more interesting curses that could be put to use. Did you know, for instance, that the bush people of Whacki Whacki have this curse that can make one impotent?"

"Whacki Whacki?" Di murmured, brow curled in confusion.

"Impotent?' Ginny perked right up with that single word.

"NO!" Both Draco and Blaise yelped, their eyes wide at the implied threat to their manhoods.

"It's some sort of translation, isn't it?" Di continued on, largely oblivious to her best friend's gleeful smirk and the boys' wide eyed looks of alarm. "Cause I mean, honestly, Whacki Whacki? What's their tribal pastime? Mastur-"

Dumbledore appeared, seemingly out of thin air, leading Di to the conclusion that, since apparation wasn't possible inside Hogwarts grounds, that he'd been there a while. Long enough to here her musings about the good people of Whacki Whacki.

"-bation." She finished, flushing pink as Dumbledore's bushy white eyebrows skyrocketed.

"I do believe you've mistaken the pronunciation again, my dear Philemon," he stated, addressing the portrait as he moved around them and settled himself in his chair behind the desk.

"It's not 'Whack-ee, Whack-ee' but rather 'Wake-e, Wake-e', which is entirely appropriate considering the Whacki Whacki are dream walkers. Does that answer you're question?"

Having not actually asked _that _specific question, but faced with the bushy eyebrowed man peering down at her with an earnest smile and neatly folded hands, all an integral part of his usual intimidation tactics, Di inched back ever so slightly, Ginny already a step ahead of her, nodding her head in enthusiastic acceptance.

"Now then, to the matter at hand, which would be…" Dumbledore trailed off, his gaze dropping to the mark on Di's neck, eyebrows raised in silent contemplation.

"Professor?" Ginny ventured after a few moments of prolonged uncomfortable silence. Di, having been equal parts too embarrassed and intimidated to speak, shot her friend a grateful look.

"Conoodling," Dumbledore finished, his gaze drifting over to the two boys, eyebrows skyrocketing as he recognized the reigning Slytherin Royalty.

"You forgot malicious assault," Draco sulked, definitely still pissed about the hair which had taken the better part of an hour for Professor Snape to undo.

"There was nothing malicious about it," Ginny protested.

"It was done to provoke harm!"

"To what? Your hair? Oh, woe is Malfoy. His hair is purple!" Ginny rolled her eyes and leant forward. "Personally, I think you look better with the purple hair."

"Nobody asked you, Weasley."

"Too damn bad!" Ginny was really getting into this whole argument thing, especially since it was completely pointless. She excelled in the pointless and irreverent. "Because I'm telling you, Malfoy, you could use a little color! I walk past you sometimes and have to double check to make sure I didn't miss your untimely death!"

Draco sneered at the littlest Weasley because, after all, it wasn't his fault the fates had graced him with a pale complexion and hair to match.

"Well at least I don't look like a carrot planted itself on top of my head!"

"It is not the color of a carrot!" Ginny was on her feet, hand going for a wand that had been oh-so conveniently confiscated by Snape before he left them. "You take that back you….you…._albino_!"

"I AM _NOT_ ALBINO!" Draco was on his feet, fists clenched and face turning an alarmingly bright shade of red as he struggled with his obvious urge to strangle the spirited red head sprite.

"Children." One word had all four of them turning their gaze to the only adult in the room. "Sit down."

Sliding back into his seat with his usually sulky expression in place, Draco crossed his arms and turned his attention back to the brunette next to the red head.

He recognized Ginny Weasley, of course, since for the past couple of years he'd made a point of tormenting her and her family for no reason other than it was expected of him. He did not recognize the pretty brunette who's neck he'd been all too happy to mark up.

His reasoning was still a bit vague on _why, _exactly, he'd given her a hickey instead of cursing her nose off, but in a pinch, he was more than happy go with the simple explanation of embarrassment. Granted, at the time, he remembered experiencing an overwhelming urge to mark her, to claim her in a way that would be obvious to all others and to herself. Still, very few girls he knew of enjoyed such an obvious statement of their extracurricular activities.

_Of course_, he realized with a frown, _guys like that sort of thing._

He should know, being of the male persuasion himself. A girl with a hickey was an invitation few males could ignore. It implied a certain appreciation for certain sports that men were apt to spend most of their time fantasizing about.

For some uncontemplatable reason, he wasn't too thrilled with the thought of anybody approaching _his _blue eyed brunette.

The word homicidal came to mind.

Di had no idea why Draco's glare had suddenly intensified, but she was happy it had. That meant he was mad at her, which lessened the likelihood of a repeat of events on the train.

_Too bad_, her hormones whispered, quite saddened by the loss.

_Oh hush you hussies_, the rational part of her mind responded. It was a _good _thing, no matter how much her body seemed to think otherwise.

_He had to have had a lot a practice_, the rational part of her brain continued somewhat cautiously, _cause he knew _exactly _where to go and what to do._

For some reason, that pissed her off. How dare he use moves he learned necking on other girls to neck with her?

_Bastard_, she thought with a low growl that had Ginny swiveling her head to look at her, but her angry gaze was quite firmly locked with Malfoy's.

Blaise knew women. Having lived most of his life exclusively in the company of two of them, he understood them a lot better than he ever wanted to. The only good part of the whole thing, as far as he was concerned, was that it made it easier for him to get laid.

It made it too easy. Getting girls had ceased to be a challenge even before the summer had started. Returning to Hogwarts now in the fall, he'd been looking forward to very little, going through the motions of planning his 'rounds', but one spell from Ginevra Weasley, and all that was over with.

She'd given him the challenge he'd been looking for, and not necessarily in the bedroom.

He was still curious as to how she'd managed to get that spell through his shields.

When this little meeting was done with, he'd write an inquiry home for his mother. If she didn't know the answer, she'd find somebody who did.

He nodded to himself, secure in his plan, his attention snagged by Dumbledore's door opening, admitting Professor McGonagall, Professor Snape, Prefect Amanda Jones, and Prefect Gordan Hayes, who'd had the misfortune to stumble across Blaise and Ginny mid-snog.

They _still _hadn't managed to get his features quite back to normal Blaise was pleased to note. Between him and Ginny, they'd made Gordan's face into something that made Picasso's paintings look normal by comparison.

Oddly enough he was more pleased with her than he was with himself.

"Miss Weasley, Miss Whitmore," Professor McGonagall's lips pursed as she regarded her two most troublesome students. And to think, when Fred and George Weasley had graduated she'd breathed a sigh of relief.

"I see that we're getting off to an early start this year," her gaze drifted to the two Slytherin's and widened ever so slightly.

"Prefect Jones," Dumbledore started the proceedings with the female who'd interrupted Draco and Di. "I see your color is coming back nicely."

For once, Di couldn't claim any credit. Draco had fired off the color changing spell, leaving a very bright pink Jones gaping at the two of them. Now instead of resembling a bottle of Pepto Bismol, she was more of a baby-girl-pink. In a couple of hours she'd be back to her normal olive skin tone.

"It is," Jones agreed with a slight nod. "No thanks to these two."

"Hey!" Di protested. "For once I am completely blameless."

"Is this true, Miss Jones?" Jones desperately looked like she wanted to argue, but grudgingly nodded instead.

"It was Malfoy who cast the curse," she managed to get out through gritted teeth, her eyes narrowing as she glared at the blonde prat, who all but preened as he admired his handiwork.

For a spell that was only supposed to last an hour, it'd held up quite nicely in the four hours since the original incident.

"In that case, Miss Whitmore, I cannot punish you for the assault on Miss Jones, however, there is the other matter to consider."

Somewhat mortified at the memory of just what she'd been doing when Jones interrupted, Di sunk low in her seat and averted her gaze to the floor to avoid any more embarrassment.

Professor McGonagall had been briefed, ever so briefly, on the events that had prompted this meeting, but it was still hard for her to believe that two of her Gryffindor's would be caught frolicking with two of Snape's Snakes.

Now, taking in Mr. Malfoy's somewhat mollified expression and the half grin on Snape's face, she wasn't quite as doubtful.

"Could we call it an accident and leave it at that?" Di offered the suggestion hopefully.

"Unfortunately, Hogwarts has a policy about public fornication."

Di choked on her own saliva as Ginny jerked her head around to stare at her best friend.

"You were _fornicating _with him?"

"No!" She yelled, turning to look at Draco for support.

"Tell them we were not fornicating."

"We weren't fornicating," Draco agreed amicably. "Though not for lack of trying."

Professor McGonagall gasped and it was Di's turn to jump to her feet.

"You _bastard!_" She lunged, surprising all of them, launching herself at Draco with arms outstretched in the optimal strangling position.

Not one to let her friend commit murder by herself, Ginny was on her feet and moving to aid when Blaise swooped in.

"Sorry, Red," he grunted as her elbow made contact with his stomach. "Can't let you do that."

"Let me go!" Ginny squirmed, twisting all around in an effort to break his hold on her.

"Mr. Zabini! Unhand her this instant!" Di and Draco had disappeared somewhere on the floor and, having born witness to the brunette's surprisingly scrappy fighting style numerous times before, magic or no magic, McGonagall was loath to interfere.

Snape had no such compunctions.

"_Petrificus Totalus! Petrificus Totalus!_"

Had the spell been cast by a lesser wizard, it wouldn't have done much more than irritate the two combatants. As it was, though, Snape was the third most powerful _adult _wizard in the school, right behind Dumbledore and McGonagall. The spell hit the two combatants, Di seconds before Draco, freezing them in mid scramble.

McGonagall quickly convinced the stoic faced Zabini that unhanding Miss Weasley was a good idea. Of course, Miss Weasley helped matters along by firmly kicking the taller boy in the shin.

"Bitch," he grunted out, limping back to his chair after carefully stepping over a frozen Draco.

"Prat," she sneered back, slinking into her own seat, scowl in place. McGongall wisely inserted her form between the two of them.

With no one else to squabble with at the moment, Ginny turned her attention to Dumbledore, who, throughout the whole mess, had quite calmly sat behind his desk with a faint smile licking a lemon drop.

"All done, then?" He perked up, popping what was left of his treat in his mouth and a delighted smile.

"As I was saying, Hogwarts has a strict policy on public fornication _and _public displays of affection, the latter of which was violated by all four of you."

Dumbledore leveled the two upright students with a firm look, sparing the two frozen on the ground a brief glance before settling back down.

"As such, the punishments are quite clear. Two weeks detention for all four of you. You'll receive notification on the when and where tomorrow morning by owl. Now," Dumbledore removed his wand from up his sleeve and twirled it around with a smile. "Miss Weasley, I'm going to unfreeze Miss Whitmore and the two of you will be escorted back to the Gryffindor common room by Professor McGonagall. And Mr.'s Malfoy and Zabini, when they are gone, I will unfreeze Mr. Malfoy and send the two of you to your common room escorted by Professor Snape."

"_Finite incantum._"

Di hated body binds with a passion. Every time someone put her in one, her nose started to itch.

Scrambling to her feet to get off of Draco, she scratched frantically at the outside of her nostril, barely paying attention as Ginny dragged her stumbling ass out of the office, Professor McGonagall right behind them.

Five minutes later, a sullen faced Draco sulked out followed by a blank faced Zabini and a half-grinning Snape.

It was a good thing Snape was bringing up the rear, because if either of the two boys had seen the smile on their Head of House's face…


	2. Chapter 2

"Ratbastardsonofabitchwhore."

"Very nice. You kiss your mother with that mouth?"

"Piss off and die," Ginny snarled in Harry's face as she stepped around him and threw herself onto the couch, ignoring her brother's pained grunt as she landed right on top of him.

Hermione was a little bit harder to tune out.

"Get your elbow out of my ribs or I swear I will hex it off."

"You wouldn't hurt me," Ginny retorted, but levied herself upright anyways as she twisted to give her brother's girlfriend a faux innocent look. "You lo_-ve_ me."

"Wrong," Hermione replied, dislodging Ginny from the couch with a firm shove and smiling serenely at the red heads surprised yelp. "I love Ron."

"But he's a Weasley," Ginny poked her head up and settled her chin on the edge of the couch. "It's a proven fact that you can't love one Weasley without loving them all. Just ask Phlegm."

"Who's Phlegm?" Di blinked, confused. She'd been Ginny's friend for several years now, but she couldn't recall ever having met someone by the name of Phlegm. It was a name she was pretty sure she'd remember the face to.

"Fleur," Hermione stated, causing Di to blink. "The vapid blonde that Bill is now married to?"

"The Veela chick?" Di struggled with the few memories she had of Bill's wife. She'd been invited to the wedding, but her mom had decided to take her on a business trip to Japan at the time.

Her older sister, Artemis, had attended, however, in her stead.

"They fit," Missy had told her, her expression completely mystified. "The strangest thing, too. I never would have pictured Bill falling for someone so…"

"Pretty?" Heloise Whitmore, their mother, stated, tossing the paper with the wedding photos on the kitchen counter.

"Annoying," Missy had finished.

"Five minutes with her and I was this close to committing homicide. This close," she held up her thumb and pointer finger, only centimeters apart.

"Phlegm," Di repeated, a lot of what her sister had said making sense now. It fit with her few memories of the blonde.

"Phlegm's an abhorrent freak of nature," Hermione stated with a delicate sniff as she laid back down to cuddle in her boyfriends arms. "The woman actually _likes_ Fred and George."

"Hermione," Ginny stared at her, confused. "Don't you like Fred and George?"

Hermione flushed and stuttered a bit, turning on her boyfriend when he made no effort to rescue her from the proverbial scrape she'd gotten herself into.

"Hey!" Ron protested, rubbing his ribs, a slow grin forming as his girlfriend glared down at him. "What did I do?"

"It's more like what you didn't do," Harry stated dryly, plopping down on a chair and amiably scooting over while Di wiggled her way down next to him.

"Which brings about the question what, exactly, did the two of you do to earn a personal escort from McGonagall?"

"Gee, would you look at the time? Best get to bed, what with classes in the morning and all. Wouldn't want to sleep in and miss them. Maybe even read ahead in the books a little before we go to sleep. Study, study, study!" Di was on her feet in a flash, following the ever increasingly babbling Ginny towards the girls staircase.

"Don't use the voice, please don't use the voice," Ginny prayed as the stairs got closer and closer.

Freedom was only a footstep away when he spoke.

"Stop."

That was it. One word and Ginny's feet froze. Her entire body froze, save for her vocal cords.

"So close," she whimpered, eyeing the stairs longingly before her expression dropped into a scowl. "Goddamnit."

"Ginevra Molly Weasley. What did you do?"

"He's using his calm voice," Di noted, her own voice eerily calm even as her wary gaze met her friends.

"We are so dead," Ginny whimpered.

"You didn't kill somebody?" Hermione was still on the couch, knees bent as she stared at them from over its back. Ron had taken the time to stroll around the couch till he was standing at its back, facing them, his impressive arms crossed over his equally impressive chest as he waited for their responses.

"Oh, dear Merlin, you did." All the blood drained from Hermione's face as she gaped at them.

"Relax," Ginny let her breath out in an angry huff as she and Di turned to face their accusers. "Nobody's dead."

"Not yet," Di muttered angrily next to her, ignoring her warning look as she scowled and rubbed her neck, a gesture that did not go unnoticed by the sole remaining occupants of the common room.

"What's that on your neck there, Bint?"

As far as pet names went, Di was fairly certain she could have done worse than Bint. Still, it was the principle of the matter that had her scowling at Ron before his question caught up with her.

Eyes dropped to the floor, she grabbed some of her hair and hastily yanked it over the all too real evidence of her and Draco's earlier activities with a flush of embarrassment and trepidation.

"Nothing. A speck of dirt. No! Wait! A spider!" Di declared in a fit of inspiration, knowing from firsthand experience that Ron absolutely _loathed_ the leggy bastards and wouldn't step near one without being under severe duress.

"Funny," Harry spoke, moving to stand next to his friend, book ending Hermione, who was studying Di with narrowed eyes and obvious suspicion.

"But I don't recall _you_ being particularly fond of spiders. Why then would you let one make you its new home?"

Just the thought had Di in a full body shiver, and not the good kind.

"Ulghhhhh," she shuddered, fixing Harry with her best evil eye of doom.

"Fess up, you two," Ron leaned back against the couch and waited.

"Well," Ginny glanced over at Di, the two of them having a silent discussion how just how much of their sordid little scheme they should share with Ron.

_The hair?_ Ginny gave a definite nod at that.

_The targets?_ Di gave an emphatic shake.

_The outcome?_

He-_ll_ no. On that they both agreed.

"There may have been a pranking on the train," Di ventured, her eyes keeping a steady staring contest with the wall behind Ron's head.

"Which may have gone a little wrong," Ginny continued, her eyes fixed firmly on the ceiling as she pursed her lips and fought for an air of nonchalance.

"And may have resulted in us getting caught," Di chewed her bottom lip as she recalled what, exactly, being caught had entailed.

"Which is why McGonagall brought us to the Headmaster's office," Ginny went on, her eyes dropping to meet her brother's before hastily looking away.

"And now we have two weeks of detentions," Di finished in a rush, bottom lip firmly caught as she peered up at the three opposite them, the epitome of doe eyed innocence.

There was a long moment of a silence under which both Di and Ginny fought the urge to squirm like the guilty parties they were.

"Bollocks."

Well. _That _was unexpected.

"Pardon?" Di asked faintly, not sure she'd heard right.

"Complete and utter bollocks," Ron continued, shaking his head and regarding the two of them with a slight frown.

"Oh, I have no doubt you pulled a prank that went horribly right, but the two of you getting caught? I've you seen you run girlie," he held his finger out and shook it at Ginny. "You run like the wind. The only way you'd get caught is if someone chased you down. Who?"

"Who what?" Ginny asked, feigning dumb as she stared blankly at her brother. Meanwhile, her mental voices were going, well, mental, screaming at her.

_Don't look into his eyes. Don't look into his eyes._ Her gaze drifted up and froze.

_Oh crap, he knows! Goddamnit, he knows!_ Her eyes darted frantically about as she struggled to find a way to save herself.

_What do I do? What do I do? Think!_ Her eyes lit on Di and inspiration struck.

"It was Di!"

"What?" Ron's almighty, all-knowing big brother expression dropped as he stared at his baby sister in complete and utter bafflement.

"Yeah, what he said," Di repeated, but with a scowl. Unlike Ron, she had a good idea in which direction this interrogation was heading and she wasn't sure she liked it.

"I pranked Di and she chased me down and retaliated. There, you got it out of me. Feels good to have it off my chest, right Di?" Di glared, slitty eyed and unhappy.

"Right, Di?" Ginny gritted out again, this time with a swift elbow to the solar plexus and a heel stomping on her toes.

"Right," Di wheezed out, doubled over, thinking that if Ron and Harry and Hermione bought this, they were dumber than she thought.

Thick as bricks came to mind as the optimal phrasing.

"Uh, huh," Ron shook his head and caught Harry's gaze. The raven haired boy arched an eyebrow, the two of them sharing a moment of amusement at the girls expense.

"You're horrible liars," Harry stated, arms crossed as he leaned back against the couch.

"Now that's a lie," Ginny retorted, genuinely miffed. "We happen to be excellent liars."

"Ginny just can't lie worth crap to family," Di finished, moving out of the red heads reach as the other girl shot her a dirty look.

"And what kind of a brother would I be if I didn't exploit that to my advantage?" Ginny's scowl deepened and Di suddenly found the ceiling very interesting as she realized her slip up.

"Now, Ginny, tell me: who did you prank?"

Since it'd already been established that Ginny couldn't lie worth a shit to him, she kept her mouth shut, her lips firmly sealed.

"Di?" It was Harry's turn to step up to the plate. While Di wasn't particular intimidated by Ron, Harry was a whole different matter entirely.

He faced dark wizards on a near daily basis; intimidating one lone brunette was a piece of cake.

"Uhhh." Opening her mouth was the first mistake. Ginny hitting her again was the second.

"ItwasMalfoyandZabini," Di got out in a rushing exhale, a sigh of relief immediately following her next inhale.

At last, she'd gotten it out.

Ginny glared at her friend, the idiot Bint, for an extra long moment before turning to face their inquisitors.

Ron jaw was clenched tighter than a Hippogryff's ass, Hermione's jaw was somewhere in the vicinity of the floor, and Harry, wonderful, _delightful_ Harry…was grinning.

"Was it permanent?" Was his first question.

"Unfortunately, no," Ginny breathed out heavily, blowing a few stray strands of hair out of her face as she adopted her best tough chick stance and waited for the next barrage.

"What, exactly, did you do?" Hermione asked next.

"We hexed their hair purple," Ginny stated, deciding to go with the straight forward answer and leaving out their clothing choices for the blessed event.

"Wicked," Harry breathed with a wide smile. Draco was legendary for his pride over his hair. Changing it to such a clash-worthy color was the _perfect_ revenge.

"Did they retaliate?" Ron asked last with a thunderous frown that promised great bodily harm if they had.

"No," Di answered quickly, saving her friend the embarrassment of another failed lie. "They caught us and then the Prefects came."

"Thank Merlin," Hermione stated, but it was more of an afterthought as she regarded the two of them with continued suspicion.

She wasn't the smartest witch at Hogwarts without good reason, and she knew there was something more to the story than that.

Besides, none of that explained the hickey on Di's neck.

"If the inquisition is over with," Ginny stated, her voice icy with annoyance. "We're going to bed. Goodnight Ronald. Hermione, Harry."

With one last regal nod, Ginny turned and headed up the stairs, Di on her heels.

"Do you think they bought it?" Di asked, the second they were safely ensconced in their room, their roommates already asleep.

"I think it'd be a good idea to avoid them for a while," was Ginny's answer.

* * *

"Should I be breaking out my mourning robes?" Pansy inquired the second the portrait closed behind Snape. She glanced up at the two scowling males, idly flipping a page in the book she'd been reading as she took them in.

"Very funny, Pans," Draco scowled, tossing himself on the nearest empty couch, arms crossed and furious gaze on the ceiling.

"If they're not dead, then what, exactly, did you do to them that entailed such a long period in the Headmasters company?"

"You missed the Sorting and the Feast," Daphne picked up from the chair she'd been occupying the corner. "Spill."

Draco desperately wanted to tell her to mind her own business, but years of feigning maturity and decorum kept the words firmly entrenched in his throat. Blaise, thank Merlin, had no such compunctions.

"Mind your own business, Greengrass," he retorted, hands in pockets as he made it way to the stairs.

"Coming, Draco?" He asked, pausing at the bottom of the stairs and turning to find his friend frowning up at the ceiling, his anger giving way to obvious confusion.

"Hmm?" Draco turned his head and blinked at his friend, his scowl returning as he caught sight of Pansy's smirking mug.

"Yes, bed. Goodnight," he nodded coldly to the two girls before following his best mate up the stairs.

"Well," Daphne stated, eyes narrowed as she watched their feet disappear at last, their footsteps fading.

"They definitely did something," Pansy agreed, her own expression equally suspicious.

"They aren't going to tell us," Daphne pointed out, her gaze slowly drifting back to her best friend.

"Not voluntary," Pansy agreed with an almost cheerful purse to her lips and a devious glint in her eyes.

"I do love it when you get devious," Daphne feigned fanning herself and fluttered her eyelashes. "It gets me all a twitter."

"You're definitely a twit," Pansy agreed, laughing as Daphne scowled and chucked a pillow at her head.

"Tomorrow morning," she finally stated. "We'll corner them. One way or another, we're going to get answers."

Blaise and Draco had been friends long enough to understand that sometimes the best thing to do in an instance such as this was not, as most people believed, to talk it out. Rather, Draco gathered his supplies and headed for the showers while Blaise gathered his own provisions and set about writing a letter.

Composing it proved to be more difficult that he'd imagined.

After all, it wasn't like he could write the truth as it was.

_Hey Mum, guess what? Someone broke through my shields today and instead of killing them, I snogged the shit out of her._

His mother would be aghast at his horrible grammar and alarmed at the thought of his shields being that weak. Blaise didn't even want to contemplate her reaction to the snogging.

Nothing was supposed to be able to pierce them, least of all a color changing hex.

In the morning, Blaise decided, he'd have Draco test a few spells on him, just to make sure.

That decided, he wrote a pleasant missive to his mother, idly inquiring as to what circumstances would be necessary in order for a spell to make its way through his shields.

Draco returned just as Blaise was finishing tying the letter to his owl's, Myrddin, leg.

Silently, the two of them climbed into their beds, their eyes connecting a sharing one troubled thought before Blaise doused the lights.

What the hell was going on?

* * *

Slytherin and Gryffindor tables were on opposite sides of the Great Hall for the obvious reason that it kept the occupants of their respective tables from killing each other.

Di had never really seen the point since, as far as she could tell, most of the hexing and assorted attempted murders occurred _outside_ the Great Hall anyways.

Still, the distance was nice.

"He's still staring," Ginny muttered under her breath and around a bite of toast as she narrowed her eyes and glared from under lowered lids at Blaise Zabini.

"You only know that because you're staring back," Di retorted calmly as she sprinkled an unhealthy amount of pepper on her scrambled eggs.

"You'd be blissfully unaware of his staring and all otherwise if you'd just done what I have, and sat with your back to him."

"Draco's staring at you, too," Ginny answered Di's unspoken question. "And so are Greengrass and Parkinson."

"I don't do girls."

Dean Thomas stared at the brunette as he slid into a seat next to her, his expression confused and amused.

"That's nice," he stated, reaching for the syrup. "It's good to know. The male population appreciates it."

"That's why I said it," Di hastily bit out, her mind still in full panic mode, a left over status from the night before. It'd taken hours for her to fall asleep after contemplating all the reasons why Draco Malfoy had bit her.

Answers ranged, in her mind, from the perfectly normal 'he's a vampire' to 'he required a blood sample for dark magic in which he makes me his eternal sex slave and pimps me out because his albino dick is so photosensitive he can't reveal it to the light, so he sets up special spells so he can watch in a dark room without fear of it bursting into flames.'

Ginny had stared at her for several long moments after that hastily stuttered explanation that morning in the showers before offering to obliviate the whole experience from her head.

"No thanks," Di had replied, pale faced and shaky. "I really can't afford to lose any more of my memories. Mum threatened to stick my head in a magic resistant cone if I start mysteriously forgetting things again."

"O-_kay_." Dean glanced across the table at his ex-girlfriend, only to find her glaring at someone behind him.

Twisting in his seat to follow her line of sight, he let out a startled yelp as Di Whitmore yanked him back around and clapped her lips to his own.

He stared at her in wide eyed surprise, the brunette having her eyes firmly closed and the rest of her face scrunched up in a manner that clearly indicated her lack of enjoyment in this particular act with him.

He counted ten long, silent, seconds before she released him, pulling back and reluctantly opening one eye to peer up at him to gauge his response.

"What. The. Hell?" Di had to think fast. Across from her, Ginny was shooting her a grateful look as she hastily averted her gaze from Zabini watch.

"Uh…" Di searched her vast lexicon of excuses before finally settling on one that seemed plausible.

"Ginny was right. You are a better kisser than Harry."

And that led to a whole other set of problems.

"WHAT?" Ron Weasley turned to glare at Harry, and he wasn't the only one. Across the hall, Draco had begun to growl, softly and low in his throat when _his _girl had locked lips with Thomas, but hearing what she'd said in the sudden silence of the Great Hall…

"I'm going to kill him." Blaise, as a good friend, quickly spelled him to his seat, though he wasn't any happier with the knowledge that _his _Ginny had locked lips with the Boy Wonder.

"It was an accident!" Harry had his hands in front of him, a vain effort to hold off the angry red head should he chose to charge. His anxious eyes sought out a wide-eyed Ginny's.

"Tell him!"

"It was an accident!" Ginny exclaimed, unaware of the silence in the hall as she did her best to prevent a homicide. "We were trying out one of Fred and George's pranks-"

"Say no more," Ron relaxed as quickly as he tensed, his expression still unhappy, but understanding filling his gaze.

Granted, he was completely _misunderstanding_ the situation, but who was Ginny to correct him?

And Merlin knew Harry wasn't going to volunteer the fact that the kiss had been entirely voluntary on both their parts. He liked his parts where they were and in working order.

"Wait," Hermione spoke, confused. "When did you kiss Di?"

All eyes turned to the girl in question as she flushed under the scrutiny. Even Ginny.

Di mumbled something while Harry held his head in his hands.

"Did you understand that, cause I didn't," Ron turned to his frowning girlfriend.

"All I could make out was Valentine's day, love potion, and Lockhart."

"I was eleven years old," Di finally stated, exasperated. "Lockhart accidentally doused me with a love potion."

"You told us Cho was your first kiss!" All eyes bounced back to a flushed Harry.

"She was! My first _voluntary _kiss!"

The Golden Trio fell into an argument, debating the meaning of the words 'first kiss' while Ginny and Di exchanged relieved looks, their deceptions drifting along unnoticed in light of the new, far more interesting, debate.

"So…what _were _you staring at?"

"Look at the time," Ginny sprang from her seat, dragging poor Di up for the ride, and practically dragged the girl out of the hall.

"Nice talking to you, Dean!" She called out over her shoulder.

"What talk?" Dean muttered sarcastically, shaking his head and eyeing the general vicinity where the crazy tart had been staring before shaking his head and reaching for the jam.

* * *

Ginny and Di's first class on the first day of school turned out to be Charms.

By the time they figured that out, they'd interrupted every class from Transfigurations to Divinations, missing out on Potions only in the fact that Charms happened to be the second to last class they'd tried.

Their reasoning had been if Potions was the class they'd missed, they were better off not showing up at all rather than showing up late.

Still, missing the majority of the class earned them another nights detention. It was originally supposed to be two, but Flitwick had a soft spot for Di and her baby blues, plus she had a wicked skill with the art.

They managed to wrangle the rest of the schedule out of another roommate of theirs, a delightful chit named Bea Lang who traded their schedules in exchange for a date with Dean.

"Shouldn't we ask him before we start arranging his love life?" Di asked as Ginny unrolled and studied their class schedules for the weeks to come.

"Hmmm?" Ginny glanced up at Di. "Dean likes Bea. He told me she was the second hottest girl in our year, right after me. Course, I was dating him at the time, so he could have been lying about the second part."

"So he's not going to be mad at us?"

"Doubtful," Ginny replied bluntly. "He's male and she's got great legs."

"Right. So what have we got next?"

"Transfiguration," Ginny nodded. "Followed by Defense Against the Dark Arts, separate for Divinations and Arithmacy. Care of Magical Creatures. Herbology. And we end the day with Potions."

Di grimaced. Before, she disliked Potions on the basic principle that Snape was a bastard who had it in for anyone in Gryffindor, doubly so for anybody who happened to have six red headed siblings and friends thereof.

Now, there was the misfortune of it being the dungeons, which both she had Ginny had recently acquired a whole new reason to avoid.

"Do we have an escape plan?"

"Don't volunteer for anything and RFRF."

"Gotcha," Di nodded, expression set. "Let's get this over with."

* * *

Professor McGonagall's face was scrunched up as the two girls slid quietly into their seats.

Di made a point to carefully clasp her hands on the desk in front of her and cross her ankles, parchment and quill carefully laid out, and expression in place lending her the air of the perfectly prepared and ready to learn student.

Next to her, Ginny snorted. Di's angelic demeanor lasted for all of the first punch, verbal or otherwise, and then any semblance of lady-like orderliness disappeared and her inner sailor broke out.

Still, Di was good with putting people at ease, which made her an invaluable minion.

In the front of the room, Professor McGonagall narrowed her eyes before turning and heading for the board to begin the days lesson.

The next time she turned around, Di was drooling on her parchment and Ginny was using the quill to give Di a modified version of the Dark Mark, complete with smiley-faced eye holes and a pierced tongue.

"Skulls don't have tongues, Weasley," Graham Pritchard, one of the Slytherin's in their year, murmured quietly from where he sat across the aisle.

"This one does," was Ginny's quiet and inarguable reply, her own tongue sticking out in a childish display of mockery, earning her an arched eyebrow and a faint grin in response.

"Ow!" Ginny fingered the back of her head gingerly and turned to glare at the offending party.

"Pay attention," Bea hissed, pretty features scrunched up in a less than attractive scowl. "You're gonna cost us house points!"

Ginny couldn't give a rats ass about house points and was about to tell Bea that when McGonagall turned back around, pausing in mid sentence as she caught sight of them.

Di chose that moment to wake up.

* * *

She'd been dreaming she was back on the train with Malfoy. He'd had his teeth sunk into her neck, his hands at her waist, and his voice in her head.

_Mine_.

"I'm a person," she stated in her dream. "Not property to be claimed."

Dream Malfoy hadn't liked that and sunk his teeth deeper into her neck.

"YOWZA! Let go of me, you vampiric hussy!" Also, apparently the wrong thing to say to Dream Malfoy.

He'd released her neck and, moving way too fast to be a simple human, had his head in front of hers before she couldn't even blink.

"Mine," he'd state, his gray eyes glowing brightly, giving his eyes a distinctly silver cast, and blood dripping from his too long canines.

"That's nice," Di had replied, eyeing the bloody teeth with a large amount of caution.

Dream Draco was apparently pleased by this assertion because, with a startled yelp, Di suddenly found herself wrapped around him like a freaking monkey, one of his hands wrapped around her back, the other firmly supporting her ass as he turned from the wall and started walking.

"Hey!" Di exclaimed, startled. "Watch the hands, buddy!"

Dream Draco growled and Di fell backwards with another startled scream, her fall ending as abruptly as it'd begun, her body bouncing slightly on a silk bed.

Her legs were still wrapped around his waist as he growled again, his voice dropping into a low purr as his hands slid down from her knees and up over her hips.

"What," Di started, her voice a bit breathy as her gaze darted from his hands to his face, his glowing eyes catching hers once more and she forgot her question.

His growling purr changed again as he slowly lowered himself down and started a slow, sensuous crawl up her body.

She was distracted by his movements, so it took her a few seconds to register this change as what it was. But the second she figured it out…

"You bastard!" Her hand flew up to smack him on the chest. "Stop laughing at me!"

Dream Draco didn't like this. Dream Draco _really _didn't like this.

Di let out another startled yelp as she was unceremoniously flipped onto her stomach, Dream Draco coming over her body and effectively pinning her in place, his breath a tickling presence on her ear.

"Ge' off," she snarled around a mouthful of bed sheets, only to freeze right up when Dream Draco let out another growl worthy of animal planet.

_Don't move_, it said. _Don't you dare fucking move._

Di was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. She went stiffer than a corpse as Dream Draco lowered his nose to the nape of her neck and…_nuzzled._

_WTF?_

He nuzzled his way down her neck, to her shoulder, and up to her chin, before giving her ear a sharp little nip and causing her breath to catch in her throat. He purred as he repeated the procedure on the opposite side, chuckling outright at Di's indignant yelp that followed the second nip.

"Look, you bastard, I don't particularly appreciate," Di started once she reached the conclusion that he was done for the moment.

Boy was she wrong.

* * *

She woke up with an angry yowl.

"Bad Malfoy! No biting!" She screeched, eyes wide, face pale.

The room, occupied exclusively with Gryffindor's and Slytherin's, stared at her.

"Ugh," Di blinked a few times, but her color didn't return. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"You're not the only one," Holly Flint murmured, her upper lip curled in disdain at the thought of the halfblood dreaming about anyone, least of all the Prince of Slytherin.

"Definitely gonna be sick," Di continued, bolting from the room without so much as a by your leave.

"Oh. _Gross_," the students heard the distinct sound of wretching, followed by numerous statements of disgust.

"Miss Weasley," Professor McGongall started for the door, wand at the ready to dispose of the mess. "Would you please escort Miss Whitmore to the infirmary?"

"No problemo, Prof," was Ginny's reply as she hurried out of the room after her best friend, all the while pondering her words and contemplating a question of her own.

What was with Malfoy and all the biting?

* * *

Draco had completely spaced out, leaving Blaise to complete the fairly complicated potion in front of them.

He spent the first five minutes of the allotted brewing time doing his best to snap his best mate out of his stupor, but Draco hadn't so much as blinked.

Eyeing his glassy eyes with no small amount of suspicion, Blaise resigned himself to completing the potion on his own and got to work.

Meanwhile, Draco was having a very strange experience.

He'd been fine, listening to Professor Snape introduce them to the days work before splitting off into partnerships and setting about their business.

Then, without any warning, reality ceased to exist and he found himself back on the train with Diana Whitmore in front of him, looking good enough to eat.

_She's wearing the same clothes she was wearing on the train, _his rational mind pointed out. Baggy jersey advertising some Muggle sports team, jeans with rips in the knees and ratty hems, and a pair of boots that had seen better days a _long _time ago.

In short, she was a mess.

He wanted to bite her. He _needed_ to bite her.

So he did.

He sunk his teeth into her neck, in the exact same spot as before, and lapped up the blood like a freakin' dog with water.

_Mine_, was the only thought going through his head, the only feeling going through his whole body. Diana Whitmore was _his._

"I'm a person," the hussy stated, interrupting him, her voice just the tiniest bit breathless. "Not property to be claimed."

Oh, _No._ She was definitely his. He set his teeth deeper in her skin, marking her further, setting out to prove to her that she _was _his. His saliva seeped into the wound, seeped into her, and he remembered, vaguely, that that was a _good _thing and that he _needed_ to keep doing it.

"YOWZA! Let go of me, you vampiric hussy!" Her words broke through his haze, prompting him to release her with a bloody snarl.

_Not a vampire,_ he thought, even as he moved to face her, taking in her wide eyed look of surprise and chalking it up to the blood in his teeth.

"Mine," he growled possessively, staring into those gorgeous blue eyes and snarling at the thought of her denying it.

"That's nice," she replied, her gaze dropping to around his mouth, her struggles easing, her breath emerging in a small huff.

Draco liked that. He liked her calm, not struggling. It made things easier.

Vaguely, in the corner of his mind clearly marked as 'rational thought', a miniature representation of his common sense was screaming at him that something was _wrong_, but too much of his attention was focused on the girl in front of him and getting done what needed to be done.

He eyed the train wall for a moment, deciding that it wasn't comfortable enough for his plans, and reached down to pick her up in search of greener pastures, so to speak.

She yelped and slapped at his chest, glaring at him as he turned and started walking.

"Hey!" She exclaimed, eyes narrowed as she slapped at him again. "Watch the hands, buddy!"

Draco spotted the bed the second he turned around, his rational brain kicking the sides of a skull as its efforts to point out the complete and utter irrationality of everything to him went swooshing right around his gray matter like cosmic toilet water, swirling and swirling and disappearing down a metaphysical vortex to Merlin only knew where.

Her words caught up with him and he growled as he tossed her down onto the soft, silky bed. She shouldn't be worried about where his hands were. He had every right to put them wherever he pleased and he was going to show her that.

Her legs were wrapped around his waist, a warm vice that embraced him and made him long for more. Running his hands around his back to place them on her legs and follow their lines up, he felt some of his tension ease, his bones going liquid at the rightness of it, a low purr starting deep in his chest to go with the feeling.

"What," she started, her breath hitching as she looked first at his hands, then up into his eyes and completely lost her train of thought.

She was so cute when she stared at him like that and Draco laughed deep in his chest as he slowly lowered the rest of his body against hers, each inch of contact setting off nerve endings he hadn't even known he had.

He crawled up her body, determined to have her lips for the first time when she hit him.

"You bastard!" She snapped, eyes narrowed in angry comprehension. "Stop laughing at me!"

Draco snarled at the violent contact and interruption of his plans.

He wanted to see her face, truly he did, but it was too distracting. As much as he wanted her kiss and her expression, he needed to get it done and he needed to get it done _now._

He moved swiftly, flipping her onto her stomach and lowering his body over hers as an effective prison, her delectable ear almost at biting level.

"Ge' off," she mumbled around a mouthful of bed sheets, which was not what he wanted to hear.

He growled again, warning her against making such statements and she went rigid underneath him.

He'd scared her.

He felt a moment of pure panic then.

She wasn't supposed to be afraid. His entire being protested the thought of her being afraid _at all_ and the added thought that it was _him_ causing it made his stomach cramp up most painfully.

He needed to calm her down, to bring back that playful fighter and good humor that was her in all her glory.

Leaning down, he gentle, almost reverently, let his lips whisper across her neck, smiling softly as her breath caught.

He started at her neck, opposite of his mark, and let his lips lightly caress her skin, moving up to her jaw and over to her ear, putting that delicious looking earlobe right in the way of temptation. Draco obediently gave it a little nip, purring when she let out a hissing breath.

Lowering his head to the opposite side, he repeated the process, carefully moving around his mark and up to her other lobe, giving it similar treatment to the first, before pulling back in preparation.

She mistook this as the end and started to speak.

"Look, you bastard, I don't particularly appreciate," she started and he sunk his teeth into her neck, deeper and harder than ever before.

He heard her screaming in his head as he came back to reality with a painful thud.

* * *

Blaise had almost been finished with the potion when Etain Farris, a thick but gifted seventh year Hufflepuff commonly referred to as 'No-Brain Etain' due to his apparent lack of intelligence in anything and everything except Potions, had sneezed.

Right into his potion.

While admittedly it had contained a lot of vile and disgusting ingredients, mucus of anything had not been on the list.

The results had been interesting at first. A few multi-colored slight explosions just above the cauldron, not unlike a miniature fireworks display.

And then the cauldron had started shaking.

Even Snape had watched with sick fascination as the cauldron rose in the air and started to spin.

Faster and faster it went, with all eyes save for Draco's following the dizzying motion with dizzying results until, with a faint puff and a lingering odor of beer, the contents of the cauldron disappeared, taking it's apparent ability to levitate with it.

Unfortunately, during the duration of its travels it had levitated itself right over an oblivious Draco's head.

With a loud and very uncultured swear, Blaise threw himself at his friend, tackling him out of the way, the two of them hitting the stone floor with a painful thud.

And then Draco finally blinked and came out of his stupor.

"Owww," he moaned, reaching up with his hand to touch his head, coming away with blood.

"What the bloody hell?" He turned to glare at Blaise, his attention catching on the cauldron lying nearby and the dent it seemed to have left in the floor.

Not lacking in intelligence, just in a sense of fair play, it didn't take Draco more than a couple of seconds to arrive at the conclusion that Blaise had obviously saved his life.

"Thanks, Mate," he stated, trying to levy himself upright.

It took him a few seconds, but once he was upright he became aware of two things.

One, his mouth tasted funny. And two, everyone was staring at him with dropped jaws and wide eyes, even the Boy Wonder and his formerly bushy haired sidekick.

"What?" Draco looked over at Blaise, who was only slightly less dumbfounded than the rest of the masses. "What's going on?"

"Draco," Blaise started, his voice carefully parked in neutral, his expression just a _little _bit shaken. He tried to think of a delicate way to break the news of Draco's not so pristine appearance to the more than slightly vain blonde, but he was beaten to it.

"He's a bloody vampire!" No-Brain screeched.

Chaos erupted, the noise way too much for poor concussed Draco. He had just enough time to reach up and feel his way too sharp incisors before darkness descended.

In that tiny corner of his brain called 'rational thought' a miniature version of him masquerading as his common sense threw up it's non-existent hands and conjured up a heavily padded chair, plopping down with crossed arms and a pout.

"Nobody fucking listens to me," he grouched.


	3. Chapter 3

Di was feeling better by the time they reached the infirmary and since it was such a lovely day, she and Ginny decided to forgo the pleasure of Madame Pompfrey's company and head out to the lake.

"So…you were dreaming about Malfoy?"

Di was fairly certain that was just about the dumbest non-question Ginny had ever asked her and was in no mood to justify it with a response.

"Was he naked?" Di jerked her head so fast around she choked on her own saliva.

Ginny, she thought, was just a little too enthusiastic about thumping her on the back for it.

"No!" She finally gasped out, coughing a few extra times to clear her airway before glaring at her friend. "We were both fully clothed."

"Huh," Ginny chewed on the inside of her cheek and studied her friend carefully.

"Huh, what?" Di asked, curious as the inner workings of Ginny's mind. Not that she really wanted to be able to comprehend them anyways. God knows what would happen to her own thought processes if she ever were to truly succeed.

"Nothing," Ginny blinked in confusion. "I was just saying."

"Oh. I was hoping you were coming up with some sane, logical, completely rational reason for why I'm dreaming about Malfoy and his unusually large-"

"I'm sensing this is a bad time."

Harry felt ill. He looked ill, too, but mostly he felt ill.

He'd spotted Ginny and her partner in crime sneaking out the main door during his free period and decided to follow them. The two of them were always good for a couple of thrills, even better than the twins, actually. Cause with the twins, there was a method to their madness. With Ginny and Di, though?

Total chaos.

Of course, this kind of chaos he definitely could have done without.

He viewed Di as sort of a sister, despite the whole 'attacking me in the corridor while under the influence of a love potion and before she'd even fully entered puberty' way back in second year.

He really didn't want to think about her thinking about Malfoy and his big…

_Oh, God._ He felt a little vomit work its way up his throat and choked a little bit.

"Teeth, Harry. Teeth," Di, who was sufficiently twisted enough to have followed his entire line of thought from start to finish, stated with no small amount of amusement. "I was talking about Malfoy's unusually large teeth."

"Oh." Now _that _made sense.

"So you heard about what happened in potions today, did you?"

"Potions?" Ginny and Di exchanged a confused look. "We were talking about Transfiguration."

"What happened in Transfiguration?" Harry blinked, wondering if the Transfiguration thing would be as interesting as the Potions thing.

"What happened in Potions?" Ginny countered, having been trained at a young age to know that it was always better if you could get the other guy to spill the beans first.

That way, you knew exactly how much you have to lie about and how far you could get away with it.

"Malfoy almost got killed by a levitating cauldron," Harry started.

"No shit?" Ginny grinned widely, her mind already conjuring up a wicked awesome mental picture.

"Zabini tackled him out of the way, unfortunately. Gave him a concussion in the process, though." Harry smiled slightly at that. Vengence wasn't exactly his, but seeing his sworn nemesis (Voldemort didn't really count. Voldemort was like a toothache that just wouldn't go away. Harry would be happy to see his snake-loving ass rotting in hell for all eternity. Malfoy, on the other hand, was more like herpes. He popped up with a fresh batch of warts every once in a while, making his life miserable, before retreating and letting him view life with a new perspective. He was kind of like a douche. Oddly refreshing in a weird sort of way.) in pain a definite highlight to his day.

"So what does that have to do with teeth?" Di had followed the explanation pretty well, her own thought processes allowing her an abridged version of Harry's, minus the whole Voldemort tangent, but not telling her anything about how Harry would know about Draco and his unusually large teeth.

"Well, he had blood on his head from hitting the floor, and when he sat up, he also had blood on his teeth, which were definitely not normal teeth. Those suckers were huge."

"How huge?" Di asked, voice shaking and face pale.

"Ah, three centimeters, maybe? No-Brain called him a vampire and he pretty much passed out after that."

"Malfoy passed out?" Ginny perked up, her mental cheerleaders having a go at things, dancing with glee at the thought of all the insults and joy she could milk from that simple bit of information.

"Like a prude in a porn shop," Harry confirmed, his own grin matching Ginny's.

"What about the teeth?" Di wanted to know, completely oblivious to the mischievous undercurrents that were passing between her usual partner in crime and her occasional one.

"Oh, those. Snape reckons it was something in the potion, which doesn't make much since when you think about it, considering that Draco was never hit by so much as a drop of the potion." Harry frowned as the thought caught up with him.

"Had to have been the potion," Di agreed, hastily scrambling to her feet and wiping the grass from her butt.

"'Scuse me," she brushed past a still cackling Ginny and a puzzled Harry and headed back to the school in search of…hell if she knew. Her sanity, maybe? Because sometime between the train ride and the start of the term she seemed to have lost it.

_This is all Malfoy's fault._ Her brain finally spit at her.

There wasn't a particularly large amount of rationality to go with the thought, but that was okay.

Rationality was for squares, anyways.

Conclusion, right or otherwise, reached, she pondered her possible courses of actions as she re-entered the school.

* * *

Meanwhile, back at the tree, Ginny had finally clued in to her friends absence.

"Where'd Di go?" She peered around her suspiciously, since it would be just like the brunette to cast a disillusionment spell before tackling her and shoving her face in a mud puddle.

Wand at the ready, and hand reached out to feel about for any suspicious persons who didn't belong, Ginny abandoned an oblivious Harry and headed back to the school and her next class.

Harry was aware that his two companions had disappeared, but he didn't particularly give a rats ass.

"If it wasn't the potion," he stated out loud to nobody in particular. "Then what the hell was it?"

And then…

"What happened in Transfigurations?"

* * *

Slytherin's were reknowned for their cunning and sneaky ways, which was why Blaise and Draco were completely surprised by Pansy and Daphne's plan for seeking out answers.

"This is harassment," Draco complained, tugging at the ropes binding his wrists to the arms of the wooden chair Daphne had conjured for him.

"I prefer to think of it as a friendly, non-threatening bonding ceremony." Pansy stated from her position seated on the old teachers desk in front of him.

"So that knife is just for show?" Daphne frowned.

"What's wrong with having a knife?" Draco didn't particularly want to justify that one with a response.

"It's a family heirloom," Pansy waved the question off. "Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother willed it to her."

"How the hell could she have willed it to her?" Draco wondered out loud. "She was dead before Daphne was even born."

"Her will said 'give it to Daphne.' I'm the only Daphne the Greengrass family has," Daphne pointed to herself with the knife to emphasis her…point.

"As fascinating as that is, can we get back to the matter at hand?" Blaise tugged at his own wrists and arched an eyebrow in curious frustration at his two female friends. "Why are we tied up, again?"

"Because you've been avoiding us since the train and we want to know why," Pansy stated bluntly. "It's not like the two of you to be so…"

"Mopey," Daphne finished, sticking the point of the knife into the wooden desk next to her.

Draco was affronted by the thought of him experiencing and displaying characteristics of such a plebian emotion such as mopey, but before he could open his mouth to say as much, Blaise spoke.

"I am not mopey," he stated with as much regal authority as he could possibly muster.

"You could have fooled me," Pansy snapped, good-humor drying up in an instant.

She'd been best mates with Blaise since they were diapers. Their parents had even discussed a marriage contract, they were that close. The only thing that had stopped them was the fact that Blaise's mother, while fond of Pansy, had seen their relationship for what it was, namely a familial bond rather than a potential match.

Draco she'd known only slightly less longer, since about age five. He'd dumped sand in her hair and she'd used accidental magic to give him the mother of all wedgies.

He'd been suitably terrified of her for about a day before deciding that any girl who could fight that dirty was definitely worth being friends with.

She loved both of them like brothers, the same as she loved Daphne like a sister. As far as she was concerned, blood didn't mean jack shit. These people were her family and her family was keeping secrets from her, big secrets if Blaise and Draco's lackluster attitudes were anything to go by.

_Goddamnit, _she was worried.

She _hated _being worried.

"I'm tired, I'm angry, I'm frustrated by the fact that two of my best friends have suddenly decided that I don't need to know about the big things going on in their lives, and I am this close to killing someone, and the two of you are starting to look like real good targets."

"You wouldn't kill us," Draco shot back, his usually play boy smirk popping up on his face as he regarded her with eyes full of mirth despite the…situation. "We're your best friends. Closer than family."

"Right now you're a pain in my ass," Pansy crossed her arms and glared, slitty eyed, at the two of them. "And I like pains in my asses the same way I like any other pain: gone. Now, are the two of you going to start talking, or am I going to have to get creative?"

Draco blanched while Daphne grinned wide, and Blaise stared at the two females stoic faced for a moment before speaking.

"Ginny Weasley got a spell through my shields."

Pansy didn't even have time to suck in a surprised breath before time stopped.

* * *

"Has anybody seen Draco or Blaise?" Theodore Nott poked his head in the sixth year boys dormitory, which was currently occupied by three people.

"Nobody's seen them all day, mate," Graham stated, placing a bookmark in the book he was reading and levying himself upright with lethal grace and a frown. "Why? Is something wrong?"

Theo, like most upper year Slytherins, had a certain level of disdain for the years below him, and if it had been anybody but Graham asking the question, he would have brushed him off without so much as a good-bye, but Graham was family.

"Nothing, except nobody seems to know where Pansy and Daphne are either."

Graham straightened a little bit more at that. While it wasn't unusual for Draco or Blaise to disappear for a little while throughout the day, Pansy and Daphne usually spent most of their time surrounded by throngs of admirers or suck-up wannabes.

"Do you think something might have happened to them?" Theo's eyes drifted to the other two occupants of the room with a frown.

Harper Connell was sleeping, soft snores emerging from his open mouth, and Ivan Gorgivich was hastily scribbling out an essay that was due in an hour.

Even though both of them seemed completely occupied and oblivious, Theo wasn't willing to take any chances.

"Walk with me?"

It wasn't so much a question as it was a demand and Graham didn't hesitate to obey. Theo may be in charge of him, but he honestly liked the guy. He was smart, well thought, and blessedly free of a cumbersome ego. If he asked Graham to do something, there was usually a damn good reason to do it.

"We're not supposed to be involved in this," Graham stated the second they were alone and out of ear shot of anybody, even the portraits.

"It's a favor from Grandpa." Graham choked on that one.

Oh, he had no doubt it was a favor promised by one of the Elders, but _Grandpa?_

"Dare you to call him that to his face." Theo grinned.

"He promised the courts he'd keep an eye on their wayward progeny."

"All of the courts?" Graham arched a skeptical eyebrow at that because, honestly, there were a _lot._

"Most of them," Theo amended, hands in his pockets as he kept a casual pace. "The big ones, at any rate."

"And the rest of them?"

It was a surprisingly easily forgotten fact that wizards weren't the only magical being that was accepted into Hogwarts. It was also easily forgotten that a lot of magical beings could interbreed with wizards surprisingly well. Even more forgotten was the fact that blood from a magical being could assert authority over wizarding blood whenever it damned well pleased. And boy had it ever.

"Mother asked us to keep watch."

Graham sucked in another breath, this one emerging in a long, angry hiss.

"Mother's talking to us again?"

"Yes."

That was it. No 'apparently' or 'so they say'. Just an unequivocal 'Yes'.

"Do were need to alert the Hounds?" Something in the way Graham said it just screamed capitals, and Theo wasn't going to correct him. In a situation like the ones he was obviously considering, the Hounds would be more than appropriate.

"No," Theo stated, taking his hands from his pockets and running them through his slightly curly hair. "They're still on campus, just…hiding."

"From what?" was Graham's logical response.

"I have no idea." Theo opened his mouth to say more, but before he could so much as inhale for breath, his entire world seemed to implode.

He could vaguely hear Graham yelling, calling out after him, but he was running without pause, heading for…

* * *

Luna Lovegood woke up with a headache. Since she'd gone to sleep with a headache for the last seven nights, she wasn't particularly surprised by this turn of events.

Tired, in pain, and a little annoyed, yes, but surprised?

Her roommates were gone, off doing whatever it was that good little Ravenclaws did, leaving her in a dusk filled room with tired eyes and a heavy heart.

Sitting up in bed, she ran a hand through her messy blonde hair, definitively shorter than years previous. When the headaches had started, she'd cut the majority of it off in the vain hope that it was the extra weight causing her the pain.

She didn't really miss the hair that much, but it was still a little disconcerting to reach up and find it missing.

Yawning until her jaw cracked, she shuffled from her bed into the bathroom.

Running her hand over her face, she positioned herself in front of a mirror, eyes still bleary from sleep, and reached down to turn on the sink, looking up as she did so.

She had no idea what happened next. Juliette Celeste, one of her roommates, said she'd gone into the bathroom to touch up her make-up and found Luna lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

She was dazed and confused as she was helped to the infirmary, only peripherally aware of her surroundings.

Madame Promfrey hovered over her, asking her questions she obediently answered, still caught up in a surreal haze.

The only thing she was sure of, beside her own name, was that something was missing. Someone that was supposed to be here with her wasn't, and it was scaring the crap out of her.

Even more terrifying was the fact that she had no idea where this new desire had come from and the level at which it was consuming her…

"Miss Lovegood!" Again, Madame Promfrey was in front of her, shoving some sort of potion in her face, but Luna pushed it aside, her breathing fast and her heart beat racing. She didn't have the breath to tell the school nurse that potions wouldn't help. She'd been trying for the last couple of weeks, but nothing ever helped. Not calming potions, not headache potions. She'd been so desperate she'd even resorted to muggle medications, but nothing.

She was hyperventilating, desperate from relief, when a dark, curly haired, brown eyed, frantic Theodore Nott came barreling around the corner and right into her suddenly wide opened arms.

It was hard to say who was more shocked by her desperate grip on his shoulders, Madame Prompfrey or herself.

Rounding the corner after his leader, panting lightly at the race across the school grounds, Graham took in the scene in front of him with a quick eye and an even quicker understanding.

"Sorry, Madame Prompfrey," he greeted with a faint grin. "Couldn't keep him away."

"Mr. Pritchard," the nurse greeted the sixth year with a faint frown, her gaze drifting to the tightly clasped pair. "I take it that Mr. Nott and Miss Lovegood know each other?"

The intimately part was more or less implied, and Graham really didn't have much of a choice but to run with it.

"Been going strong for almost a year now," he confirmed with a blithe grin and a mental note to keep his story straight in his head.

After all, he was going to have to explain it to Theo later, when he came out of his mental funk.

Luna had no idea who the boy in her arms was and she was past caring at the moment. Her head hurt, her mouth tasted like the fuzzy lint you found in your pockets, and the only thing keeping her from hyperventilating was the fact that she had her arms around this boy and the knowledge that he'd protect her.

If she were in her rational mind, she'd be a little puzzled by the sudden rush of calm that seemed to envelope her at the thought. But it'd been years since she'd been rational, so she wrapped her arms tighter around the boy and buried her nose in his neck and just breathed.

* * *

"That's not possible." It was Daphne who spoke first, her baby smooth skin blanched a deeper shade of pale as she stared, knife forgotten at her side.

"I know," was all Blaise said by way of response.

"Did you contact your mother?" Part of Pansy's mind was screaming in all-too real alarm. Weasley was a known consort with the light families, while the Zabini's were almost notorious for their shady ways. If one Weasley could get through Blaise's shields, what about the others?

There was no love loss between the two clans. Pansy was damn close to hyperventilating at the all-too real thought of her best friend dying at the hands of some misguided red-headed vigilante.

"Yesterday," Blaise confirmed with a nod. "I'm expecting a letter some time tomorrow in response."

"Are your shields failing?" Was her next logical question.

"No," Draco spoke, his voice terse. "We tested them this morning. They're strong as ever."

"You don't think…" Pansy trailed off, eyebrows hitching at the thought bouncing through her head.

"What?" Blaise asked, sharp gaze fixed on the brunette.

"You don't think she's one of you…do you?"

Blaise could honestly say the possibility hadn't occurred to him until that very moment and his breath seemed to catch at the thought.

But it whooshed out just as fast as the lessons that his father had taught him from an early age swooped back in.

"Wouldn't matter if she was. The shields are supposed to work against everybody, even my kind."

His kind, of course, being both wizard and Fey.

He was only half Fey, though, a distinction that both he and his family, including his friends, counted on.

Only three people aside from his parents and guardian knew about his mixed blood, and they were all in the room with him.

"Then how the hell did she do it? And what the hell does this have to do with Draco?"

"Nothing," Blaise replied, blinking in surprise at the second question and forgoing answering the first because, honestly, he couldn't think of a single thing to say.

"Then what the hell is up with you?" Pansy rounded in on the blonde, smirking internally as he blanched in the face of her understandable anger.

"Especially with the teeth," Daphne piped in, hand drifting back to the knife. "I really want to know what's up with the teeth."

So did Draco.

"I don't know what's up with the teeth. The teeth seem to have a mind of their own."

"You're not a vampire, are you?" It was more of a curiosity question than anything else. Daphne may play the part of a dumb blonde, but she had a lot more going on for her than people thought.

And the knife was a definite part of it.

There was a reason she'd brought the knife here, after all, and not just because she had a penchant for all things sharp and shiny.

The knife had been gifted to her from an ancestor with a similar…legacy to her own. It detected the presence of certain hostile magical beings, most specifically vampires, and if Draco had been one, he wouldn't just have been flinching from the presence of the knife.

He would have been burning.

As it was, Draco was getting tired of people calling him a vampire.

"I am not a vampire," he gritted out through clenched teeth, eyes narrowed and a low growl working its way out from deep in his stomach.

"Then what's with the teeth?" Pansy asked again, arms crossed as she sat on the desk and regarded the two of them with a puzzled frown.

"I don't know," Draco replied, hesitating a moment before continuing on despite his better judgment. "But I know why I get the teeth."

He paused again and regarded his companions with a somber face.

"It's Diana Whitmore. It all started with her."

* * *

Oblivious to the fact that she was currently being discussed by four snakes in a hidden room, Di was having a hard time keeping her cool and decided that a trip to Madame Pompfrey, however belated, would be a good idea.

Her stomach queasy, she entered the infirmary to a bizarre scene.

Theodore Nott, seventh year Slytherin and a lesser Prince of Doom, had his arms wrapped around Luna Lovegood, sixth year Ravenclaw, general space case, and a friend of both hers and Ginny.

Hovering over the two of them was Madame Pompfrey, who had her wand out and was staring with complete mystification, and a growling, snarling Theo, while Graham Pritchard, a sixth year Slytherin Prince-in-training, was standing between the two of them, gamely trying to talk Madame Pompfrey into putting it away.

Standing in the doorway and staring at this bizarre tableau, she heard the footsteps behind her and turned to find Dumbledore, Snape, and Flitwick bearing down on her at a rapid pace.

She managed to scuttle to the side as they blew past, Snape sparing her the briefest glance, his eyes widening slightly as he gave the rest of the room a cursory exploration before, with one last frown in her direction, he turned his attention to the rest of the rooms occupants.

"Madame Pompfrey," Dumbledore greeted the frazzled nurse with a nod before turning his attention to Graham. "Mr. Pritchard. I dare say it would be an act of futility to try and separate Mr. Nott and Miss Lovegood?"

"Not to mention an act of massive stupidity," Graham replied with a cheerful little grimace.

"I see." Dumbledore eyed the embracing couple for a couple of seconds before turning to face a pale faced and immensely confused Di.

"Miss Whitmore. I take it you're finally seeking treatment for your little debacle this morning?"

"Huh?" Di blinked at her headmaster. "Oh, yeah, right. Finally. That's me."

"And where is your companion?" There was an odd note to his tone, but Di wasn't used to analyzing Professor's Snape's vocal patterns, so she ignored it.

Having spent the last six years under the man's tutelage and care, Graham was a little more in tune with the various inflections in his head of houses voice.

"Ginny?" Di peered around her, confused, as if realizing for the first time that Ginny wasn't with her.

"Uh, by the lake, I think. I don't know. I think I lost her." Actually, Di was fairly certain she'd left her behind deliberately, but, again, her brain was a little rattled.

Her logically thought out plan that had led her here, aside from the vague aching of her neck and head, had been something along the lines of Madame Pompfrey was a nurse, and nurses cured things, so it shouldn't be much of a problem for her to fix this.

The problem with that line of reasoning that she wasn't quite up to thinking about was the fact that she wasn't having a medical problem.

Graham, again being more used to his head of house's vocal normality, could tell that it had most definitely not been Ginny Snape had been inquiring about.

Which, of course, had him regarding Di with more interest than usual.

"Professor McGonagall tells me you threw up in the hallway. Are you feeling nauseas again?"

Abandoning her attempts at treating Miss Lovegood, since having Mr. Nott thoroughly embracing her seem to be medicine enough, Madame Pompfrey focused her attention on the only other infirmed party to walk through her door in the past five minutes.

"Uhhhh…." Di couldn't actually tell if she was nauseas or not. Mostly she felt like a shirt that was shoved in the dryer on the tumble cycle. Everything was spinning and she didn't seem to have a leg to stand on.

"How about you go ahead and lie down on a bed and we'll check you over?"

It was the first logical instruction Di had heard all day.

* * *

"What all started with her, exactly?" Pansy would have to have been an idiot not to know that Di Whitmore was somehow involved in this. She'd seen the hickey and she'd seen the way Draco had been staring at her at breakfast.

"The teeth!" Draco snarled out with no small bit of frustration. "I chased her down on the train and suddenly I had to bite her."

"You had to bite her?" Daphne tapped the knife against her shoulder and arched a disbelieving eyebrow at her fellow blonde.

"Yes!" Draco snapped back. "It was like someone else had slipped into my skin. One second I was angry, the next…"

Draco faltered, not really sure how to describe, exactly, how he'd been feeling the moment he'd cornered the brown haired vixen.

"It was like having someone put a steak in front of you after years without meat. All I could think of was biting into her, marking her…." He trailed off gone, eyes peering off into a distant something only he could see.

"Marking her?" Pansy narrowed her eyes and regarded Draco with careful scrutiny.

"It was like I had to mark her and warn other people away from her," Draco stated, suddenly tired. "She made me feel…"

"Possessive," Daphne stated, nodding her head once when Draco shot her a relieved look.

"Yes," he hissed, happy to finally have that out in the open. Daphne stared at him a moment, aware that both Pansy and Blaise had turned their attention to her as well.

The teeth, the mark, and the possessive instincts all fit. The fact that she'd never in a million years have thought that this could happen was only a vague notion by this point, since all the evidence spoke for itself.

She was surprised, though. Not surprised enough to not act like a true Slytherin, however.

"Draco, my friend…you're fucked."

* * *

"I can't find anything wrong with you."

Graham snorted from where he sat in a chair next to the bed both Theo and Luna were still occupying.

It'd been a half an hour already, but Graham wasn't about to rush them. Finding your soulmate wasn't something that happened to their kind on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, it was pretty damn rare.

Besides, he'd already made the necessary arrangements, slipping out while Pompfrey was otherwise occupied with Di Whitmore.

He'd gotten in touch with the Elder's, and the only other of his kind on school grounds aside from Theo.

Su Li's eyes had gotten real wide when he'd told her what had happened, duly impressed in spite of herself.

"Lovegood?" She had shaken her head in confused disbelief.

"The world is a strange and beautiful place," Graham had replied from where he was leaning against the wall.

"Does this change things?" Had been her next logical question.

"Only minimally. The Council is sending a fourth player in to help run fringe work while we wait for Theo to come back to himself. Orders still stand, though."

"Who are they sending?"

It was an understandable question, not just because she needed to know who she'd be working with, but also because their options were somewhat limited. They didn't have much by way of a youth force, since their numbers had been somewhat stagnant as of the last couple of centuries.

"Hanson," Graham had replied, bracing himself for her responses.

"Hanson?" Su stared at him in blatant disbelief. "As in Cobe 'Cobra' Hason? The American?"

To be fair, there were a lot of American's, but this one stood out all on his own.

After all, he had killed his clan leader at age fifteen. Granted, the guy had been…twisted. Suffice to say, if he hadn't done it, someone on the council would have.

Still, having heard stories of Nigashi Strada, Graham was looking forward to meeting the boy wonder who'd taken him down with little bit of fear, a whole lot of awe, and a hope that the kid could keep it together for the duration of his stay cause any mess he made Graham was probably going to have to clean up.

"When is he set to arrive?"

"Tomorrow, around dinner. Councilman Rasha is making the arrangements."

"And Elder Cole?"

The man Theo referred to as Grandpa had arched a surprised eyebrow at the news.

Graham wasn't part of the man's inner circle like Theo's family, so conversation hadn't been initiated.

Still, Graham had been left with the distinct impression the man was laughing.

"Keeping his silence on the matter." Su snorted at that.

"Shocking. I'm heading back to my common room now. Call me if you need anything."

"Will do. Keep your eyes peeled for strangers."

"Will do."

* * *

Ginny Weasley had completely lost track of her friend. Di had completely vanished so thoroughly that Ginny was almost positive she wasn't playing a prank on her.

Almost positive.

When Di didn't show up for Care of Magical Creatures, Ginny was worried. When she wasn't waiting for her at Herbology, Ginny was _really _worried.

When she showed up for Potions, Ginny was disappointed.

"Of all the classes you chose to _not _to attend today, why couldn't you have made Potions one of them?"

"Because Professor Snape was there when Madame Pomfrey released me from the infirmary and threatened to give me a detention if I didn't show up."

"He actually threatened you?" Ginny was impressed in spite of herself. You had to have done something pretty damn special to garner personal attention from Snape himself.

"Well, not verbally," Di corrected, leaning back on the bench and pursing her lips, glancing at her friend out of the corner of her eye. "But he gave me a look."

"Ahh," Ginny nodded her head, completely understanding. Some people were naturally gifted with words, and some people were naturally gifted with the ability to visually threaten you with a single arched eyebrow.

Snape was pretty good with both, now that she had time to think about it.

"So what did Madame Pomfrey say was wrong with you?"

"Stress." Ginny blinked because, well, Di was probably one of the least stressed people Ginny had ever met. Granted, the girl had an imagination, see her theories on 'why Draco Malfoy is biting me', but she was pretty mellow the rest of the time. Saying she was stressed was like saying the Pope kept a harem of whores.

It was almost blasphemous.

"Apparently it explains everything. The nausea, the head-spinning, the fatigue. There's only one thing it doesn't explain."

"The biting." Ginny nodded her head knowingly.

"The biting," Di confirmed, raising a hand to her neck with a sullen scowl.

* * *

Draco sat in his last class of the day, Charms, slouching sullenly in his seat while Blaise tapped his quill against the parchment in front of him. Behind them, Daphne was hunched over her parchment and Pansy was frowning as she struggled to piece together the pieces of the very strange puzzle they suddenly found themselves a part of.

On the opposite side of the room, Ron and Hermione were talking quietly while Harry frowned off into space.

He'd learned through various sources (Bea Lang) during lunch that Di had been sick during Transfiguration after waking up screaming something about Malfoy biting her.

On one hand, it could just be a happy coincidence that Di just _happened_ to have a dream about Malfoy having extra large canines on the same day Malfoy just _happened_ to sprout some.

On the other hand, Harry's life and happy coincidence very seldom coincided.

"So what misadventure is almost going to kill us this year?" Ron interrupted his thoughts somewhere in the middle of class with cheerful disregard.

"Huh?" Harry turned and blinked at his friend.

"Honestly, Harry," Hermione rolled her eyes. "We've been your friends long enough to recognize _that _look."

"What look?" Harry asked, still very much confused.

"The look you get when you're pondering something that's undoubtedly going to come back to bite us all in our collective ass later on," Ron finished his original thought, mouth quirked up in a faint grin, keeping a lookout for Flitwick in his peripheral view.

"I was just thinking about Malfoy's teeth."

"Oh, gross," Hermione winced and Ron actually turned an interesting shade of green.

Harry had a moment of perplexity before his words and Ron's commingled in his head and spit out a disgusting mental picture that had him gagging for the second time the day.

* * *

Theo released his death grip of Luna sometime around late afternoon, long after the girl in question had fallen asleep and shortly after his sanity finally returned to him.

His mind was completely boggled and the rest of him was pretty confused as well.

Grandpa had told him about this, but he'd also told him the possibility of it happening to Theo were pretty damn slim.

"We fucked up," the old man had put it bluntly. "We made assumptions that we knew better than Mother and she punished us for it. She left us to find our own mates and most of us screwed that up."

Birth rates were in the dirt, marriages that were happy rather than hostile or at the very least apathetic were few and far between.

"The only good thing about this whole mess is it's forced us to think in terms of strategy rather than relying on sheer numbers."

Before, when their numbers had still been high, going to war had been about as natural to them as breathing. They fought for everything, over everything. Now, with their numbers failing to replete themselves, they couldn't afford to lose one let alone a hundred.

The number of bitten shifters had increased.

So had the number they'd had to put down. Desperate clans were trying to turn people who had no business wearing one skin let alone two.

The Council monitored changings now, keep a careful eye on the newly turned, watching for signs of madness.

Fenrir Greyback was one of the one's who'd slipped through the cracks.

Remus Lupin was another.

Greyback they were going to kill. Lupin, on the other hand…

On the bed next to him, Luna made a small noise in her sleep, rolling over until she was firmly cuddled into his side before letting out a small sigh and sinking deeper into her dreams.

Theo stared down at his mate in complete mystification.

So, he'd found his mate, now what the hell was he supposed to do with her?


	4. Chapter 4

"I really don't know what you're upset about," Daphne was saying for the umpteenth time as she trotted along behind Draco as the blonde stormed down the halls to the dungeon.

"I'm a freakin' Veela and my mate is a freakin' Gryffindor. What the hell _don't _I have to be upset about?"

"Well, the teeth for one thing," Daphne stated logically. "Once you're done mating her, the teeth will go away until one of you is threatened. And then you get wicked cool claws to go with them."

Draco drew up short just outside the Slytherin Common Room and rounded in on the short girl.

"Just because you have an obsession with tools of disembowelment does not compel the rest of us to share in your twists."

"What's so twisted about it?" Daphne shrugged her shoulders as they entered the common room. "Disembowelment is a perfectly acceptable way to win an argument."

Entering behind the two arguing blondes, Blaise and Pansy exchanged a bemused look.

As her best friends, they were well used to Daphne's unusually cheerful belief that violence was the solution to all the world's problems.

Draco growled in frustration before storming up the boys staircases, knowing full well that neither of the girls could follow him up.

"No fair," Daphne pouted, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. "That's cheating."

Blaise shook his head in disbelief and ambled up after his friend.

He found Draco sprawled on his bed staring up at the ceiling and wearing a contemplative look.

"What was it like?" He asked as soon as Blaise shut the door behind him.

"What was what like?" Blaise asked, heading over to his own bed. Just because weird shit was happening lately didn't mean he still didn't have homework assignments to complete.

"Finding out…you know," Draco made a vague up and down motion to himself.

Blaise arched an eyebrow at him before casting a silencing charm around the room and a locking charm on the door.

"Finding out I wasn't completely human?" Blaise finished his aborted question, settling himself on his own bed with a heartfelt sigh and joining Draco in contemplating the glories of a wooden ceiling.

"I don't remember much," Blaise started, hands laced over his stomach as he frowned. "I was pretty young when my dad told me, about three or so. It was around the same time he gave me my shield. I remember wondering why it was necessary and him telling me that there were people out there who wouldn't like who I was. People who wouldn't like what he'd done by letting me be born."

"Did he ever explain why?" Draco tilted his head up to look over at his friend.

"No," Blaise continued to frown. "And it's not like I can ask anybody. Aside from my Dad and Gaia, I've never seen another Fey."

At least, not one that he could recognize. There were hundreds of different types of Fey, his father's people, the Sidhe, being the current highest on the food chain, making them the most dangerous of the moment.

"But it's always been a part of your life."

"Ever since I can remember," Blaise replied with a little shoulder shrug. "There are days where it pissed me off, but most of the time…"

Draco sat up and turned to face his friend, waiting for him to finish his thought.

"Most of the time I like being different."

There was a thrill, a rush that came with the knowledge that you weren't the same as everybody else.

That you were capable of so much more than they were.

The problem was he couldn't show it. Granted, there was an ego aspect to all of it. He could easily excel in his classes and do well with magic, but there were parts of him that _were _the magic, parts of him he couldn't use or have access to because of that very fact.

It was like an itch most of the time, one he'd learned to live with. Irritating and just under the skin, just waiting for him to grasp it, to _use _it.

"But some of the time I wonder what it would be like to be normal." Blaise let his breath out in a huff before turning to look at his friend. "I envy you."

Draco had a moment's of intense confusion in which he contemplated the source of Blaise's envy. First, was, of course, the hair, which was ridiculous since Blaise had professed a profound dislike for Draco's overzealous grooming habits.

Next what the Veela thing, which was stupid because Blaise was Fey, which pretty much trumped Veela.

Third was the whole mating thing, which was dumb, because, as a teenage boy, who wanted to be tied down to one female for the rest of their life?

Finally, came the thought, quickly followed by homicidal urges, that Blaise was envious of Draco's mate. Which, of course, Draco sincerely wished was not the correct answer, because then he was, unfortunately, going to have to kill his best friend.

"At least you got to be normal for a while."

The possibility hadn't occurred to Draco and even as he opened his mouth to respond, he quickly shut it.

Cocking his head to the side and studying Blaise, he could see the stress that came with hiding his existence in the other boys frame, and the sadness that came from denying who you were that lined his face.

Veela were a haphazard part of the wizarding world. Veela's had been known to mate wizards and muggles alike. Their progeny were considered beautiful and rare, but an acceptable part of both societies.

The Fey were different. A long time ago before the wizarding world came to exist as it did, the Fey and the wizards were often at war.

They fought over land, over waterways, over pride and over their perceived rights.

The fighting had ended mysteriously and quite abruptly some millennia prior, but the hostility had never fully gone away.

There were rumors that the fighting had come to a close only by the actions of a group of half-breeds, wizard and Fey mixes that had literally sacrificed themselves to create peace.

They hadn't appealed to either sides sense of mercy, since in times of war both sides were known to have little to none, but rather they were rumored to have appealed to the Goddess herself, who apparently granted their request.

Rumor was she'd taken away some of the great weapons of war from both sides, and threatened to take away their magic itself before peace was finally declared.

The Fey had left, then, disappearing to a place they had no name for and reappearing sporadically throughout the years.

Because it had been half-breeds who had prevented their victory the Fey had taken an unsurprisingly hostile view of interbreeding with wizards. Uncharacteristically, they preferred Muggles to wizard kind, and there were a fair share of beautiful half-Fey, half-Muggle's out there.

But wizards and Fey interbreeding?

Blaise knew of very few people like him. Two others, to be exact. A female across the sea in America, Texas to be exact, and a male from South America.

His father had told him they were both older, wiser, and that if he were ever in trouble to contact them and they would help.

There were more, he knew, but they either didn't want to be involved at all, or they were actively hostile.

Draco knew what a normal life was like. Sort of.

His parents were Death Eaters, after all. But aside from the whole 'worshipping the Dark Lord' thing they had going for them, they were, to the core, a very close, very loyal family.

Not counting Aunt Bella.

Or cousin Sirius.

Or any extended relative beyond a Malfoy cousin and Draco's parents.

Still, he'd gone out, he'd played, he'd performed accidental magic without fear of anything but praise.

Blaise had spent most of his childhood in hiding, going out rarely, and interacting even less than that.

His magic had been carefully monitored by his mother and the only other Fey he knew aside from his father.

Gaia was a close friend of Blaise and his mother as well as their bodyguard.

She was also the only link they had to his father.

Blaise didn't talk about his father. Ever. From what Draco understood, the man had disappeared sometime shortly after his fifth birthday.

"You know what?" Draco stated, mulling over the last two days and comparing it to all the years previous. "Fuck normal."

* * *

Ginny was having one hell of a strange ass dream.

She'd fallen asleep in a bed wearing girlie boxers and a tank top.

She'd woke up in a field wearing an ankle length skirt and a leather bodice that made Ginny's apples look like freakin' watermelons.

She was contemplating her new cleavage when a hand appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her.

"_Ahhhhh! Gee-_zus!" She screeched, falling backwards flat on her ass as she stared up at the very scary woman scowling down at her with her hands firmly planted on her hips. Tall and willow thin, she wore a top very similar to Ginny's, but instead of a skirt she wore some sort of leather pants tucked into calf-high boots.

"Are you trying to wake the dead, missy?" The woman asked with a thick Irish accent. "Scream a little louder next time. I don't think they heard ya in Anwwn."

Ginny blinked stupidly up at her.

The woman let out an angry sigh, reaching down and grabbing one of Ginny's arms before hauling the poor girl to her feet.

"Figures they'd send us a halfwit. Still," the woman eyed her up and down a moment. "You're a vast improvement over the last one. Whiny little brat, she was. Didn't last five seconds before someone put her out of her misery."

There was a tall scary woman gripping her arm and calling her a halfwit.

"Who are you?"

"It speaks." Molasses wasn't as thick as this woman's tone, accompanied by theatric eye-rolling for maximum sarcastic impact.

"Name's Aisling," the woman, Aisling, reached over and gripped one of Ginny's limp hands, giving it a firm shake before releasing it and marching off, half-dragging a dumbfounded Ginny behind her.

"Next I'll be supposing yer gonna ask about this place, so I'll save you the trouble. Yer in the Betwixt and Between, the place between the worlds."

"Worlds?" Ginny was still very much worried about Aisling's previous comments, especially concerning the 'last one' and someone putting her out of her misery, but in the off chance that Aisling happened to have been the one to do so, Ginny was gonna wait until the scary lady let go of her arm to open that particular can of worms.

"Sleeping, dreaming, conscious, unconscious. Very few people reach this place and then it's by invitation only."

"I don't remember getting an invitation."

Aisling regarded her as if she were a particularly slow breed of turtle.

"This is the invitation, sweetheart."

"Oh." There really wasn't much else to say after that. Well, aside from the obvious.

"What am I doing here again?"

"Oh, that one's easy enough," Aisling gave her a lopsided grin. "Mother wants to talk to you."

* * *

Di was staring up at the ceiling, feeling very sleep deprived, and wishing quite desperately for a time turner so she could go back and whack Draco Malfoy on the back of the head to prevent this whole debacle and allow her a good nights sleep.

The problem was every time she closed her eyes she saw him.

Now, granted, he wasn't exactly hard on the eyes. As a matter of fact, he was pretty damn _fine._

But there were the teeth and the eyes and the growling…

She wasn't really a big fan of being treated like a human chew toy.

Even more alarming was the fact that the hickey on her neck had been red and inflamed since the dream. Madame Pompfrey had given her a cream to rub over it to help it heal, but all that had done was make it sting like a bitch.

Tomorrow, if it still hadn't scabbed over, she was going to take Hermione aside and ask her to do a little research into things that go bite in the night. And day, for that matter.

She was pretty sure he wasn't a vampire, since he wasn't sucking her blood. And she was pretty sure if he was a werewolf she would have been dinner by now.

In the bed next to her Ginny was mumbling something about worms and Mother, causing Di to blink and turn her head, but Ginny's curtain's were closed and, with one last expletive, Ginny's steady breathing resumed.

Contemplating the canopy over her bed, Di debated her options.

She could go to sleep and have yet another weird dream about the Draco monster. She could stay awake and count the bricks in their section of the tower. She could grab her wand and do some homework.

She could head on down to the common room and see if anybody else had insomnia and pay them to keep her awake.

She didn't want to dream, she'd already counted the bricks, and no way in hell was she doing homework at one o'clock in the morning.

With a grumbling sigh, she levied herself upright and swung her feet over the side of the bed and into her puppy dog slippers, a present from her sister last Christmas. Grabbing her robe from its hook, she moved silently out the door and down the stairs.

* * *

"Who's mother?" was the first question Ginny asked. She was fairly certain it wasn't _her _mother.

Molly Weasley was nothing if not overzealous and protective. If it was her Aisling was taking Ginny to see, she'd have a lot less cleavage and plenty more layers.

"Our Mother," Aisling was smiling now, and Ginny almost preferred her scowling. The smiling had an almost…reverent manner to it.

It was creepy as hell.

"My mother is not your mother," Ginny could say with almost complete certainty. Molly Weasley had had six boys and one girl. Even though that was a lot of kids, Ginny was fairly certain she would have remembered popping out another girl somewhere between Bill, Charlie, Percy, and the twins.

"She's everyone's Mother, you kook. Come on." Aisling gave Ginny's arm another rough tug, yanking her into a tumbling trot as they maneuvered around trees and over a dirt trail, emerging in a clearing that looked suspiciously familiar.

"Have I been here before?" Ginny asked, peering at her surroundings. There was a circular arrangement of rocks, with a series of stone thrones lining one section and another throne, smaller than the others, residing in the front of them, facing them.

None of the thrones were occupied and there was nobody present save for her and Aisling, but still, Ginny could feel eyes following her.

"Spooky."

Aisling ignored her opinion in favor of dragging her in the middle of the circle and depositing her on the lone throne.

"Stay," she ordered with a finger point to emphasis the order before turning on her heel and exiting the circle.

"Arf, arf," Ginny huffed, crossing her arms and slouching obediently back into the surprisingly comfortable seat.

It took her a few seconds to realize what was so creepy about this place, aside from the whole 'mysterious stone circle in the middle of a woods' thing.

The quiet.

She was surrounded by woods but she didn't hear any birds. There were no startled fawns running away from her presence.

There weren't even any annoying flys to swat.

It was really starting to creep her out.

"I can call them back if you'd like."

To her credit, she didn't scream.

She felt like she deserved some sort of award for that, considering the woman in front of her had just appeared out a mid-air.

She was medium height, with long blonde hair, eyes that changed colors depending on how you squinted, and an extremely amused look on her face as she regarded Ginny with infinite patience.

"You must be Mother," Ginny stated very carefully. There was a theory that if you died in your dream you could die in real life and she was in no hurry to test that one out, especially with a woman who could apparently appear at will.

"And you are Ginevra Molly Weasley, youngest child of Molly Prewett and Arthur Weasley, only daughter born to the Weasley family in six generations. Do you know why you are here?"

It was mind boggling to consider that this woman knew everything about her, so it took Ginny a few seconds to catch up with the abrupt subject change.

"Uh…no?"

The woman smiled.

"Ginevra Molly Weasley, you have been chosen as my messenger." There was a pause in which Ginny assumed she was supposed to be awed and privileged with the supposed honor, but mostly she felt confused.

"Uh, thanks?" The woman's lips twitched before her expression sobered up.

_This is where she tells me the bad news._

"Ginevra Molly Weasley as my messenger you will play a key role in events to come. The journey will be hard, grueling both physically and mentally, and there is a chance you will not survive."

"Survive what?" Ginny interrupted, pressing back in her chair slightly as she regarded the woman known only as Mother with open suspicion.

"The end of the world."

Well, there was really only one logical response to that.

"You have got to be shitting me."

* * *

Di had done her best.

She'd rallied and raged against the coming of the night, but not even four cups of coffee thick enough to put hair on your chest could keep her up.

Besides, the couches were just _soooooo_ comfortable, her butt had been in heaven and the rest of her had folded like a house of cards, leaving her half on, half off the cushy piece of furniture.

It was disorienting. One second she was staring into the fire, the next she was bolting upright in a strange bed with an even stranger boy lying next to her.

"You bite me again, I'll eviscerate you," she threatened, reaching for her non-existent wand and snarling when she couldn't find it.

"What is _with _you girls?" Draco muttered eyeing his mate with a disgruntled expression.

"What do you mean by 'you girls?'" Di was sitting on her heels, her arms crossed as she glared down at a prone Draco.

"I mean first Daphne goes nuts about disembowelment and now you're getting all excited. Is psychosis programmed into the female species or is there something about me that seems to attract it?"

Di ignored his sarcasm in favor of focusing on the first part of his statement.

"Daphne?" She muttered more to herself than anybody else. "Why on earth would I be dreaming about _Daphne_?"

Draco watched his mates face curl in confusion and had to resist the urge to smile.

She was just so damn _cute_!

It was his turn to play catch up this time, though.

"You're not dreaming," he stated, levying himself upright and taking in their surroundings.

"Well I'm certainly not awake," came her sharp retort.

"Of course not," Draco agreed somewhat absent mindedly as he scanned the area for any possible threats to himself and his mate.

Unfortunately for him, he failed to consider his mate as one.

"OWW_WWW_!" He snarled, turning to find Di glaring down at him, her hands on her hips.

"Don't you dare patronize me, you…you…._male_!"

Again, Draco was wondering if either there was something in the water or if he was just fucking special.

"I wasn't patronizing you!" Draco snapped back. "I was making a statement in response to your statement!"

Well, that made sense. But it left her without a leg to stand on, so Di settled for recrossing her arms and glowering at him while mulling over the fact that she apparently wasn't dreaming.

Granted, this whole thing could be one giant messed up message from her subconscious but on the other hand, she couldn't think of a reason twisted enough for her subconscious to inflict a completely independent Draco Malfoy loose on her psyche.

"So if I'm not dreaming, does that mean you're dreaming?" It was highly unlikely but Di could keep a pleading note of hope out of her voice.

"It means that we've been yanked onto a higher communal plane of existence," Draco replied, gracefully letting his legs drop over the edge of the bed, poking at the floor with the toe of his bare foot before easing onto it.

"Stay," he ordered when Di moved to join him.

"Excuse me?" Di was back to righteous indignation. "But last time I checked, you weren't the boss of me."

"Well check again," he snarled, angry that his mate was knowingly placing herself in harms way. He ignored the angry hissing sound that seemed to emerge from her mouth as he used his eyes, ears, and nose to suss out their surroundings.

Stubborn to the core, Di swung her own legs over the edge of the bed and started to get to her feet when she felt the bed dip next to her.

Since Draco was quite plainly in front of her and there was absolutely no chance he was behind her unless he'd suddenly contracted the ability to be in two places at once, Di wasted no time in screaming bloody murder and throwing herself across the room.

Draco caught her halfway there, whirling her around behind him as he snarled in the face of whoever it was.

"Who is it?" Di was feeling much calmer now that she had a warm body between her and whatever it was and now her curiosity was in full swing. "Let me see!"

Draco, with teeth and the wicked claws that Daphne had told him about, fought the urge not only to snarl at the male figure lying on the bed grinning at him but also at the irritating female who was smacking his shoulder behind him.

Di managed to poke her head around Draco's bulk to get a good look at the figure on the bed.

He was older, probably about mid-twenties, with black hair, stubble, and puppy dog brown eyes. He was dressed in jeans, a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, and he was watching them with his head propped up on his hand and a wide, ear splitting smile.

"Whoa," Di breathed, suitably impressed, and Draco let out low, huffing growl of annoyance.

The figure on the bed's grin widened.

"Howdy!" He greeted with a thick Texan drawl. "Name's Griffen. I'll be your relationship facilitator this evening."

* * *

"So let me get this straight: Voldemort has allied himself with supreme forces of darkness who not only want to kill Light wizards and muggles, but humanity and magic in general? And you want me to stop him?"

"Not on your own," the woman (Ginny was going to continue calling her 'the woman' because calling her mother felt a bit sacrilegious, especially considering who Ginny's actual mother was) stated serenely, her hands tucked into the sleeves of the long medieval style gown she was wearing.

"That would be stupid. Not to mention suicidal. No, I want you to help assemble an army."

"Of what?" Ginny wasn't stupid. There had to be a catch in there somewhere. No way was it going to be as simple as go out and recruit as many wizards as possible.

"Everyone, everything," came the firm, passionate reply. The woman turned her wide eyes to Ginny, a passion burning so bright within them and Ginny felt the breath freeze in her chest.

"The Courts are divided. I have shown them what is to come and still they bicker. You must help unite them under one cause which to fight or all will be lost."

"Okey dokey," Ginny stated, nodding her head amiably and struggling quite fiercely with the urge to hyperventilate. "And how exactly am I supposed to go about this uniting business? Don't suppose you're going to give me some sort of wicked cool super power of mind control?"

The woman's lips turned down in a monumental frown and she seemed to grow taller as she regarded Ginny with those same fierce eyes.

"I would never infringe upon their free will. As my avatar, you shall not either."

It was a command, pure and simple, the weight of which seemed to settle on Ginny's shoulders like a yoke, shackling itself into place.

It was the oldest of binding magics, in existence almost as long as the universe itself. Even Ginny with her smart ass remarks and glib attitude bowed her head in respect to its ancient ways.

"I will gift you with the tools you will need and the companions that will help you and your mate in your quest."

Ginny followed the tools and the companions, but paused at the mate thing.

"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute." The woman obediently quieted, peering at Ginny with that same infinite patience. "What mate? You're talking about Di, right? Mate as in best mate? Right?"

Ginny didn't particularly like how her voice seemed to squeak with each passing sentence, breaking on the last word.

The woman smiled down at her with that infinite care and patience and Ginny desperately wanted to tell her to shove it where the sun didn't shine, but she wasn't _that _stupid.

"Your soulmate, Ginevra," she stated in the gentlest of tones.

"Bollocks," Ginny cursed at the situation and debated for several seconds whether or not to squibble about it, but decided that the quicker she feigned compliance, the quicker she could wake up and get out of this crappy ass dream.

"At least tell me it's not Harry." Ginny really, really, _really _didn't want to lock lips with Harry _ever _again.

Once was scarring enough.

"It's not Harry," the woman responded obediently.

Ginny waited in patient silence, but the woman didn't continue. Finally after almost a full minute Ginny turned her gaze back to the woman and arched an eyebrow impatiently.

"Well?"

"Well what?" The woman asked serenely.

"Well who the bloody hell is it?" That earned her a disapproving look from the lady in front of her.

"You've known him quite some time," she stated, causing Ginny to grown.

She knew it. She _knew _it. It was going to be Harry. Already her insides were rolling about in a decidedly unhappy manner.

That was it. She was going to die a virgin cause there was no way in hell she was having sex with Harry Bleeding Potter. Nope, not happening.

"But I didn't allow you to be properly introduced until the train ride this year."

Her breath escaped in a whoosh and she found herself gaping at the woman.

"You have _got _to be shitting me."

* * *

Ron Weasley walked quietly through the woods, absent mindedly fingering the tall grass with one hand as he passed through it, the other hand in his pocket.

"You're not supposed to be here." Ron didn't have to look to know she'd be pouting.

"Funny, but I don't remember being able to get here without outside intervention." She pouted some more before gracefully moving to an upright position, a faint smile grudgingly forming.

"Okay, so you _are_ supposed to be here. I was just being…"

"Yourself?" Ron turned to face her with a faint smirk, his arms crossing over his chest as he leaned back against the nearest tree.

She was decked out in a purple peasant top, with jeans and converse sneakers, with riotous curls in chocolate brown cascading down her neck and over her shoulders.

"You look good, Riley," he stated, voice caught between wistful and grudging admiration.

"Thanks," she smiled, showing dimples. "One of the perks of being immortal."

She jumped down from the stone wall she'd been sitting, landing soundlessly on the dirt before stepping onto the path and glancing over her shoulder at him.

"Coming?"

They walked side by side for a couple hundred meters before she finally spoke.

"How are things?"

"You tell me," Ron replied, his hands sliding back into his pockets. "You're the immortal being, after all."

"I'm immortal, _chara_, not omnipotent." Ron chuckled lightly at that.

"Things are fine," Ron stated, kicking at a rock in the path.

"And your lady love?" Ron jerked his head over, eyes narrowed, watching as Riley stopped and watched back, blank faced.

"She's fine," he stated after a moment of intense study. "Why do you ask?"

Riley was silent for a beat longer than Ron was comfortable with.

"No reason," she finally stated, turning and starting to walk, Ron half a step behind.

"Bullshit," Ron swore, half-jogging to keep pace. Riley wasn't particularly tall but she sure as hell was quick. "You wouldn't have asked if it wasn't important. What is it?"

Riley maintained her silence, hitting the upward slope of the path and committing the majority of her attention to the trek.

She moved with the careless grace of someone who'd made the same journey countless times before, whereas Ron was hindered both by his lack of experience and the fact that he was used to thinking like a mortal, pressing him into exercising an overdue amount of caution.

She waited at the top of the hill.

Ron didn't hesitate to even catch his breath as he lunged at her.

"Tell me!" His hands gripped her biceps, his lips peeled back in a fearful grimace as he shook her slightly.

"Ron…" she started, reaching up with her own hands to grab his forearms.

"Don't," Ron snarled, his usual good humor gone. "Don't you fucking dare try to get me to calm down. Something's going on, something big, and I want to know! I _need _to know!"

"Ron," Riley started again, running her hands soothingly up and down his arm, her voice full of sorrow, her eyes sad and saying it all.

"No," Ron shook his head. "Don't 'Ron' me. God, Riles, if anything happens to her…"

Why didn't she ever get the happy missions?

Riley had had many names over the years, been mentor and confidant to many people, but the job never changed. She trained, she protected, she gave shitty news to good people. Never fail.

"We're trying, Ron," was all she said, gently lowering his arms back to his sides as she ran a hand over his head and pulled him to her, accepting his shaking form into her warm embrace with a tired sigh.

"We're trying."

* * *

"I don't suppose there's any way I can trade him in for a different model?" It was a shot in the dark that had the woman's lips twitching again, but a slight shake of her head made it clear that trading up or down was not an option.

"Great, fantastic. Does he know?"

"Not yet," she replied, walking at a sedate pace with Ginny at her side. "But he will soon."

"How soon is soon? Are we talking months? Years? Decades?" She couldn't keep the note of hope out of her voice at the last one.

"Hours," was her answer.

"Damnit," Ginny swore, bringing her hand up so she could gnaw on her thumb nail as she plotted and schemed for a way to get out of this.

"You could simply say no."

Well.

Ginny blinked and stared at her, somewhat mystified.

"That's it? Just say no? Like with drugs?" She ducked her head and stared up at the woman. "No punishments? No consequences?"

"Of course there will be consequences," the woman once more regarded Ginny with that supreme authority and Ginny winced as her shoulders twinged slightly under her weighted stare. "There are always consequences for your actions, great or small."

"So…what kind of consequences are we talking here? Big ones? Little ones?"

"The world could quite possibly come to an end," was the encouraging response as the woman turned her gaze to the horizon.

"Time is growing short and I have searched far and long over many a century for one like you. I can find another, but it will take time, time that I fear I don't have." Her gaze turned back to Ginny, something swimming in their depths that had Ginny taking a step back.

"They wouldn't quite be of your caliber," the woman continued, a dark sort of humor in her eyes. "But people continue to be a surprise, even to one such as I."

Somehow Ginny felt like she'd just committed her first ritualistic slaughter and kicked a puppy all in one go. Dirt was several kilometers higher than she was.

At the same time, though, she wasn't all that keen with saddling herself with the fate of the world on her shoulders.

On the other hand, if she did this she'd have bragging rights that trumped even Harry's.

And she wouldn't have to be a virgin for the rest of her life.

"The mating will happen irregardless of your choice in this moment."

What was she, a mind reader?

"I am everywhere in every place. I know your thoughts as intimately as my own."

"So you already know my decision, then." Her lips twitched again.

"As I said, even I can be surprised sometimes by the actions of mortals."

Ginny loved to surprise people almost as much as she loved chocolate, or an afternoon by the lake with Di and the Trio.

Sadly, in this case, she was fairly certain she wasn't surprising anybody with her decision.

"I'm in," she breathed out heavily. "Where do I sign?"

"You don't have to sign anything," the woman stated, serenity back in full force.

"Then what do I have to do?"

"You simply have to wake up."

* * *

"Griffen?" Draco's teeth and claws were both fully extended, and his surly humor was firmly in place as he glared narrow eyed at the man on the bed.

"At your service," he drawled obligingly, his teeth flashing so white in his smile that Di had to reach up and rub her watering eyes.

Draco caught her movement and quickly turned his body sideways so he could check on her while keeping an eye on Griffen at the same time.

"Are you okay?" He asked, reaching up to gently place a hand on her back, rubbing soothing circles.

Di rubbed at her eye and peered up at Draco, bleery eyed and oddly off balance by his uncharacteristic show of concern and the lack of biting.

"Fine," she stated when his worried expression seemed to intensify. "I could use a pair of sunglasses, though."

"Ah, sorry about that," Griffen sat upright and Draco growled low, pushing Di behind him once more. "New toothpaste."

"Dude," Di stated, blinking at him from over Draco's shoulder. "Don't lie. You fucking bleach those suckers, don't you?"

"No," Griffen peered at her with a faintly puzzled expression. "Why would I put laundry chemicals in my mouth?"

Di opened her mouth to explain, but quickly shut it. Hardly being an expert in chemistry of any form, she really didn't understand bleach and the properties thereof.

"You said you were our relationship facilitator," Draco ground out when Di didn't respond to the guys question. "What the hell does that mean?"

"It means I'm here to help the two of you get together. I've been assigned by Mother."

"Whose?" Draco bit out tersely. Griffen blinked at him in confusion once more.

"Everyone's," he frowned. "Why would anybody else send me?"

Griffen snapped his fingers and trunk appeared next to him on the bed, soundlessly popping into existence with an alarming ease that had Di burying her hands in the back of Draco's shirt.

"What's in the box?" Di whispered the question to Draco, who was vigorously sniffing the air in order to ascertain the answer for himself.

"I smell…paper and ink." Di straightened at that and stared at him in confusion.

"Really?" Considering the chest looked like something straight out of a dungeon masters lair, she'd been expecting something more along the lines of leather and chains.

"Really," Draco's lips quirked at his mates confused expression.

"I see I'm not going to have to do as much work as I thought," Griffen's voice broke into the moment, earning him a dark scowl from Draco and a distinctly unhappy frown from Di.

"We'll start off easy," Griffen stated. "Here."

He thrust two identical books at them, wisely letting Draco take both of them and give the perfunctory sniff test before allowing his mate access to her copy.

"Read this. And this, and this, and this," Draco staggered under the influx of weight, but didn't let a single thing pass from his hands to his mates without checking it first.

"And next time we meet, hopefully I can give you this."

Di went scarlet as Griffen brandished a copy of the Wizarding Kama Sutra with flourish.

"Why can't we just skip to that one?" Draco asked, eyes filled with longing, his hand resting lightly on his mates leg behind him.

Of course, it wasn't like he hand any intention of reading any of the other books.

Draco Malfoy needing help? With a girl?

"Keep up the attitude, Mister," Griffen regarded him with narrowed eyes. Draco growled again, alarmed by the sudden realization that this man, whoever and whatever he was, was able to read his mind.

Griffen rolled his eyes in the face of Draco's threat and snapped his fingers, the trunk disappearing as quickly as it had appeared.

"My, my," he drawled, his eyes alight with mischief. "What big teeth you have, Draco. I wonder why?"

Draco snarled louder and with another flash of his blinding smile Griffen followed his trunk out of existence.

"He has a point," Di stated almost conversationally from behind him. After double checking to make sure the room was actually empty, Draco turned to find her studying him with narrowed eyes and crossed arms.

"Just why in the hell _do _you have such big teeth?"

This was so not a conversation Draco wanted to be having, especially not while he was asleep.

"Now would be the perfect time to wake up."

* * *

Ginny woke up and immediately levied herself upright, turning towards Di bed and ready to unload her proverbial cannon regardless of the hour only to find, much to her surprise and displeasure, Di wasn't in bed.

She wasn't even in the dormitory.

Frowning and wondering just where, exactly, her best mate had disappeared to, her head jerked up just as said best mate slammed the door open and zeroed in on Ginny.

Ginny opened her mouth and shut it after catching sight of the fanatical gleam in the other girls eyes.

"You." Di lurched into the room.

"Me," Ginny confirmed with no small amount of confusion.

"Come," Di motioned for the door. "You're my back-up."

Ginny slipped her feet into her own slippers, kittens, and grabbed her own robe before being jerked out of the room by an impatient Di.

"What's up? What's going on? Back-up for what?" Ginny asked as the two of them went stumbling down the stairs.

"Back-up for the homicide I'm about to commit."

"We're killing people now?" It was an intensely confusing thought. Ginny was used to embarrassment, enragement, psychological scarring and temporary maiming, but this was going to be her first homicide.

She hoped Di had picked a good target.

"We're killing Draco Malfoy," Di stated, dragging Ginny out of the portrait hole and into the hallway.

"Oh." Ginny waited a few seconds and several more lurching steps before asking her next question.

"Why?" Not that it really needed to be asked because, really, Draco was an annoying prat whose father had tried to not only kill Ginny way back in her first year, but the entire student body at Hogwarts as well.

"Because he's a freakin' Veela and I'm his mate."

When you put it that way…in for a penny, in for a pound.

"Can we kill Blaise while we're at it?"


	5. Chapter 5

Ron woke up and his first thought was of Hermione, which wasn't particularly unusual. He'd been in love with the girl for years now, after all.

The worry and near debilitating fear was new, though. Even when he'd simply been crushing on her, too nervous to ask her out, it hadn't felt like this.

It was gut clenching, vomit inducing fear and it took him a good five minutes to get it under control.

He dressed quickly, barely paying attention to what he was putting on and not even bothering to check and see if Harry was awake before rushing down the stairs and to the corner where Hermione was usually found studying when she was performing necessarily bodily functions.

He needed to hold her and he needed to hold her

_now._

_

* * *

_

Hermione had been comfortably nestled in what was universally considered her corner when an angry Di had bolted straight upright from the couch she'd been sleeping on, expression livid.

"I'm going to _crucify _him!" She snarled after spending a moment getting her bearings.

Hermione, as Head Girl, was pretty sure she was obligated to put a stop to any attempted murders.

She was debating the wisdom of interfering when Di threw herself to her feet and bolted for the stairs to the girls dormitory.

_No boys up there, _her rational brain pointed out with a puzzled frown.

Idly she wondered who Di's target was this time and calculating the odds of being able to earn back enough points to make up for the ones that would undoubtedly be lost should the murder attempt fail or succeed.

She was still musing over this when the girl in question came storming back down the stairs, a slightly befuddled Ginny Weasley stumbling along behind her.

"We're killing people now?" Hermione was relieved that Ginny was just as confused as she was. Not only did that mean she wasn't the only one out of the loop, it meant that this plan, whatever it was, was Di's.

Hermione would have almost no chance of stopping anything if Ginny was the brains behind the operation.

"We're killing Draco Malfoy," Di snarled, yanking Ginny's arm harder as they hauled ass for the portrait hole.

In spite of herself, Hermione's ears perked up and she felt her resolve to interfere wavering.

On the one hand, he was an insufferable prat. On the other, he was an insufferable prat who'd actually been pretty damn decent the last couple of years.

He also happened to be a student under protection according to her current position as Head Girl, which meant she couldn't let another student kill him.

_Maybe she could… _Nah. Obliviating yourself had nasty side effects, which was why it was a Bad Idea.

"Oh." Ginny was quiet for a moment. "Why?"

"Because he's a freakin' Veela and I'm his mate."

Hermione found herself blinking even as Ginny went blank-faced with surprise.

_Veela, Veela…_ her mind computed, her brain processed, and her eyes went wide.

Oh _shit!_

"Can we kill Blaise while we're at it?"

It was such a secondary concern in comparison with Draco the Veela, Hermione couldn't even be bothered to care deeper than peripherally.

They were out the door before Hermione could stop them and she was halfway to following them when she was plowed over by a freight train.

Or, at least, it _felt _like a freight train.

"Ge'off!" She managed to choke out around a mouthful of knitting yarn. The yarn was part of an atrociously maroon sweater that could only belong to one person.

In the part of her brain that was still calm, Hermione wondered why Ron was suddenly all hands, in a good way of course, but panicked Hermione was currently at the wheel.

Hermione struggled for a few seconds before, drawing back far enough to gulp a mouthful of precious oxygen.

Wild eyed, she stared up at a very confused Ron.

"They're going to have sex in the Great Hall!"

Ron blinked in the face of Hermione's announcement.

His first thought was _'That sounds like fun.'_

His second thought, being a teenage boy, which coincidently was the cause of his first thought, was _'But I eat there.'_

Directly following that was _'Ewww…'_

"Who?" Was the first thing he spoke outloud. "Harry?"

Immediately following that was a quick dismissal. To Ron's knowledge, Harry wasn't seeing anyone. Besides, Harry had a very notable proclivity to valuing his privacy too much to flash his business at anybody, least of all the entire Great Hall.

Hermione shook her head, still attempting to catch her breath form his impromptu greeting turned accidental suffocation.

"Ginny?" _That _was alarming in the extreme but, again, to his knowledge Ginny wasn't involved with anybody. And while the chit had a wild streak that could rival the twins combined, she was hardly the type to go sans knickers in front of people. At least not without a dare involved.

Besides, she was a Weasley. She knew better than to soil such a sacred eating place as the Great Hall.

"Dean? Seamus? _Neville?_"

"No!" Hermione gasped out, hands clutching at his sweater as she stared up at him.

"_Di_!"

"Di?" Ron was only mildly surprised. For about five seconds.

"_Di?_" He repeated, gaping in disbelief.

"And Draco," Hermione rushed on, grabbing his hand and yanking him toward the portrait hole.

"_Malfoy!_"

Ron's jaw was dropped and his brain was so scrambled he didn't notice a barely awake and far from alert Harry stumbling down the stairs.

"What's going on?" He asked, blinking as he took his Hermione's frantic expression, Ron's dumbfounded, and the general manner in which they were heading for the exit.

"Di and Malfoy are going to have sex in the Great Hall," Hermione announced, loudly and without conscious thought, as she and Ron stepped out of the portrait hole.

"And we're going to stop them!" Her voice sailed back right before the portrait hole closed.

Well.

Harry pondered his options for several seconds.

As a good and loyal friend, he should probably follow Ron and Hermione and aide them in whatever scheme they were planning to interrupt.

As a teenager, he should follow them on the off chance that something interesting and potentially blood-letting would happen.

Or he could go with his favorite answer and pretend he was still asleep and chalk all of this up to funky cheese from last night.

"What's going on?" Dean asked, yawning and rubbing his eyes, Neville and Seamus crowding the stairs behind him.

Harry let out a long suffering sigh.

"I have to go help keep Malfoy celibate."

Dean squinted as Harry trudged out the door, turning his head slightly to look at Neville and Seamus.

"Did I just hear what I thought I just heard?"

"Only if I just heard what you just heard." Seamus replied.

"Do you think that it's true?" Neville questioned. The three boys shared a look before scrambling over each other in an effort to race after their dorm mate.

* * *

Di had dropped Ginny's arm when it became apparent the other girl was fully and completely voluntarily trudging alongside her.

"So…when did you figure out Draco was a Veela?" It was a decent trek to the Great Hall and Ginny wasn't one for long silences. Besides, she was genuinely curious.

"When he told me in my dream last night."

_Well._

Ginny blinked.

_That makes _perfect _sense._

She was about to open her mouth and quite calmly and rationally suggest that they make a side trip to Madame Pompfrey for a potion to cure crazy, but memories of her dream the night before surfaced and she quickly shut her mouth.

"And you're his mate?" Di let out a low growl that was answer enough.

"Huh." In for a penny, in for a pound…

"I have a mate, too."

Di, firmly entrenched in her plot for guts and gory, was yanked out of her internal mayhem by that.

"He's not a Veela, too, is he?" Di was pretty sure they could take on one Veela, but two? Entirely different can of worms.

"Nope," Ginny replied before frowning thoughtfully. "I don't know what exactly he is."

"Do you know who?" Their frantic pace had slowed some, until it looked like they were just two oddly dressed students heading down for breakfast.

"Guess." Ginny's grim jaw said it all.

"Let's look at it this way," Di offered by way of encouragement. "He can't be any harder to kill than Draco."

"There is that," Ginny perked up and the two of them practically skipped down the last flight of stairs.

They were halfway to the Great Hall when Hermione caught up with them.

"_STOP!_"

Everyone in the corridor froze, even Ron, Harry, and the trailing trio.

"She is spending _way _too much time with Ron," Ginny murmured out of the corner of her mouth to Di. "She's perfected the voice. It took _years_ for Ron to do that."

"She always was a quick learner," was Di's helpful contribution.

"As Head Girl I cannot allow you to do this," Hermione continued on, her words short and clipped as she fought to get her breathing under control.

"Aw, come on, Hermione," Di gradually and very slowly let her muscles unlock and relax as she turned to face the quite riled Head Girl. "It's not like you haven't experienced the desire to do it more than once."

Hermione's jaw flapped a couple of times as her face got really red and her hands started spastically gripping into fists.

"Yeah," Ginny joined in when it became apparent Hermione wasn't going to attack them for moving. "I'll admit freely that _I've _thought about doing it plenty of times. And what is _wrong _with you guys?"

Hands on hips, Ginny and Di took in the scene in front of them with complete and total mystification.

Hermione looked like she was having a hernia and Ron was only a few steps behind her. Only instead of pure red, Ron was oscillating between what Ginny termed 'angry red' and 'sick green'.

Behind them, Harry was looking like he'd figured something out, but was pretty confused as to what.

And behind him the three stooges were snickering like clueless wonders.

"Really, Hermione," Di was saying. "I don't see what the big deal is. Everybody gets the urge to do it to him every once in a while."

"Not. Me." Hermione got out through gritted teeth, her fists permanently clenched as she all but snarled the words.

"What are you talking about?" Ginny was confused and not bothering to hide it. Something weird, not normal weird, but uber weird, seemed to be happening here. "You're the one who hit him back in third year. If that isn't a sign, I don't know what is. Ron? Ron?"

Ron was choking, hunched over and hacking like he was trying to lose some weight by losing a lung.

Harry had lost that confused look and wore instead a mask of dawning comprehension with a chaser of amusement mixed with a slight accent of disgust.

Behind him, the three stooges were a heap on the floor, laughing like freakin' hyena's who had obviously figured this out before any of the rest of them could.

"Oh, honestly," Ginny threw up her hands, disgusted with the lot of them in general, and grabbed Di by the arm. "We have things to do, people to kill."

Ron, having come up for air, paused in his hacking long enough to hear this lovely little tidbit.

"You're going to kill him?" His tone was oddly hopeful and both Ginny and Di paused to share a confused look.

"Duh," Di finally stated, squinting with puzzlement. "What did you think we were going to do?"

"Well, Hermione said…" Ron trailed off as his girlfriend turned her still steaming gaze on him.

"I said that we had to stop them," Hermione stated icily, turning back to Di and Ginny only to find the two girls had taken advantage of her momentary lapse in attention to scurry on down the hall _away _from her.

"Hey!" Hermione yelled, yanking up her robes and sprinting after them. "I'm not done with you two yet!"

* * *

Theo had been out on a run with Graham and Su Li trailing him when they re-entered the school to the strangest sight.

Ginny Weasley and Di Whitmore were sprinting down the hall, with Hermione Granger in hot pursuit, yelling something about murder and hormonal imbalances.

No sooner had they followed the three girls, then Ron Weasley came booking it by, hollering about food and bodily fluids.

Harry Potter was next, only he was operating at more of a slow jog as he struggled to get enough oxygen around his laughter and movement.

And finally, bringing up the rear, were the remaining Gryffindor boys from their year, looking like tomatoes and hanging off of each other in an effort to remain upright.

"That was…"

"Interesting," Su Li finished for Graham, her neck practically straining as she followed the troupes movement down the hall.

"It's trouble," Theo decided with a decisive nod.

"So we get to follow them?" Graham couldn't keep the gleeful note out of his voice.

"Yeah," Theo stated with a tired exhale. "We get to follow them."

* * *

Blaise was calmly eating breakfast when Myrrdin soared in with the rest of the school owls, deftly landing next to him and waiting with a regal eyed glare as his charge accepted the letter tied to his leg.

"What's it say?" Pansy asked, peering over his shoulder in a vain effort to read the charmed missive.

Blaise ignored her, his expression, eager at first, growing blanker and blanker with each passing word until he was very near statuesque at the end.

"Can't be good news," Daphne noted, taking a bite out of her bacon and watching Blaise with no small amount of curiosity.

Next to her Draco was slumped over a bowl of porridge, displaying a level of sullenness that could have done a Weasley proud.

He was oddly depressed over Di's reaction to his revelation the night before.

"_I'm a Veela," he explained when it became apparent that the fates weren't going to smile upon him and wake him up before this little debacle could occur._

"_Say what?" Di had peered at him in blank faced surprise._

"Vee_-la," he stated again, this time more slowly and being careful to emphasis the word to cut down on any confusion she might possibly contract._

_He waited for her reaction._

_And waited. And waited._

"_I think I'm ready to wake up now." Was her flat reply finally._

And not even a second later, he opened his eyes to his own canopy and a whole hell of a lot of confusion and depression.

"Draco," Blaise finally stated, crumpling the note in his hand. Draco glanced up, peering out of his funk at his best mate.

His funk completely dissipated seconds later when Blaise's hand caught fire.

"Blimey!" Daphne blinked in surprise even as Pansy grabbed the nearest pitcher of juice and dumped it all over Blaise.

Blaise blinked in the silence that suddenly enveloped the Great Hall.

"Draco," he repeated, his voice completely empty of all emotion as he opened his fist and let the ashes of the note sift to the table. "I need to talk to you. Alone."

Draco was obligingly getting to his feet when the last person and only person he wanted to see came racing into the Great Hall, with Blaise's newfound least favorite and most desired person hot on her heels.

Hermione Granger came screeching in after them.

"YOU _CANNOT _HAVE _SEX_ IN THE GREAT HALL!"

Of course, since the Great Hall was still silent in reaction to Blaise's juicing, the words echoed and reverberated quite nicely.

"Ginny and Whitmore are having sex?" Michael Corner's jaw dropped for a moment before a goofy grin overtook him. "Can I watch?"

Ginny ignored him in favor of glaring at Hermione with no small amount of mystification.

"We are _not _having sex," she snarled. "What the _hell _is your _problem_?"

"I can't let you do this," Hermione continued, slightly breathless, ignoring Ron and Harry as they stumbled in, followed quickly by Theo, Graham, and Su Li.

"We're not doing _that_," Di spat out with disgust. "Like I would even consider it."

Her gaze drifted to Draco and her scowl intensified.

Draco blinked again.

"What did I do?" He wondered, somewhat mystified until he recalled the events of their mutual dream.

Wisely, he shut his mouth.

"You don't have a choice!" Hermione was in full lecture mode, complete with waving arms and an extra large voice of censure. "If you start to fight with him, it leads to an influx of hormones which cumulates in a battle to determine whether or not he's strong enough to be your mate! And then you consummate it!"

"Consummate?" Some of the less vocabularily gifted amongst the audience peered around in confusion.

"Oh for the love of…" Surprisingly, it was Ron who rolled his eyes. "Sex, people. She's saying they're going to have sex!"

There was a moment of long silence while various reactions flowed through the hall.

There was the pervert's reaction, which generally led to whispers of 'Can we watch?'

There was the bimbo's reaction, which meant a lot dirty looks directed at Di and fluttering eyelashes, boob thrusting, and hair twirling towards Draco.

And, of course, there was the normal reaction.

"Why?"

Since generally when one asked a question in the vicinity of Hermione Granger, one was almost assuredly assured an answer, all eyes swung to the girl in question who, faced the prospect of having to explain the mating habits of a Veela _in detail_, flushed scarlet. For a moment, at least, and then she thrust her chin up high and regarded Di and Ginny with her best look of absolute authority.

"We need to talk."

"Fine," Ginny stated, surprising everybody with her only slightly angry reasonable tone. "It'd be a nice change from all the yelling."

"But I don't want to talk," Di scowled, hands fisted on her hips as she continued to glare at Draco, who, at some point during this freak fest, and discovered his manhood and was giving as good as he got.

"That's too damn bad," Hermione snapped, fed up with being misconstrued by the masses and ignored by the two people who really needed to listen to her.

Reaching out and grabbing Di by her forearm, she gave said appendage a good, hard yank, and half-dragged the still scowling girl towards the door.

Draco didn't like this. At least, _Veela _Draco didn't like this. And since Veela Draco seemed to be in charge at the moment, Actual Draco couldn't stop the low warning growl that emerged from his throat and floated through the Great Hall.

Wisely, Hermione paused, hand still on Di's arm, but head slowly turned to a still human looking Draco.

"We're just going to talk, Draco," she stated calmly and rationally, purposely using his name so as not to remind him of the fact that she wasn't exactly his greatest fan and that she happened to be his not-so-greatest-fan with _her_ hands on _his _mate.

"Put a cork in it, pretty boy," was Di's helpful contribution, complete with a massive scowl as she shrugged out of Hermione's grip and crossed her arms.

Oddly enough the words had a soothing affect on Draco, whose nostrils flared widely to take in his mates scent and make sure she was alright.

He could smell her anger, her annoyance, and a bit of wistful desire that had his heart beat stuttering slightly, but there wasn't any fear.

Ginny watched the byplay between Di and Draco for about three seconds before her attention turned to Blaise.

Blaise, who's eyes had never wavered from staring at her since the moment she walked into the Great Hall.

Blaise, who's warm brown eyes were locked on hers, the intensity of which had her catching her breath and releasing it in a whooshing sigh.

Next to her, Di had engaged in a quiet bickering match with Hermione, while Draco watched with a keen eye, gaze narrowing everytime Di's voice rose an octave, a snarl at the ready to be directed at Hermione each time that happened.

Ron, knowing both Hermione and Di, had meandered over to the Gryffindor table with Harry and the late arrival of the remaining Gryffindor males from their year, and all five were currently engaged in the ancient practice of face-stuffing.

Daphne and Pansy were watching everybody with narrowed eyed looks of suspicion and Ginny experienced a suddenly keen desire to be anywhere else.

"Come on," she caved, grabbing Blaise by the hand and yanking him out of the Great Hall, exiting just as the first Professor's of the day entered.

"Morning Professor's," Ginny greeted McGonagall and Snape, ignoring, oddly enough, both of their dumbfounded looks of absolute shock as she went breezing past, an almost completely mellow Blaise following right on her heels.

"Miss Weasley, Mr. Zabini," McGonagall managed to get out around a brainful of confusion.

"Did they just…" she murmured, craning her head to watch the odd couple walk down the hall, Snape unconsciously echoing the gesture with a faintly puzzled frown.

"I think they did."

"Should we be worried?" McGonagall turned to look at the Slytherin Head of House.

"Only if one of them doesn't come back," was his final reply as he went storming into the Great Hall with a mighty scowl and an expertly timed whooshing of robes.

Only to stop dead in his tracks as he watched Hermione Granger and Diana Whitmore break out into an all and out shouting match, of which he could only understand every eighth word.

And Draco Malfoy growled like a rabid dog and – _were those _canines _growing out of his mouth?_

"Uh oh," came from somewhere nearby. Snape turned his head to find Theodore Nott standing there with Graham Pritchard behind him and a Ravenclaw girl to his right.

"Draco's growling," the Ravenclaw pointed out with a rather pointed look at Theo.

"His teeth are growing," Graham wisely stated with his own knowing look directed at the older Slytherin.

"I know, I know," the other Slytherin waved off his companions next words, instead stating them out loud. "That's never a good thing."

* * *

Ginny knew the inside of the castle pretty good, about as well as one could know the inside of a magical castle that liked to rearrange itself every once in a while, so it only took her a few minutes to locate an abandoned classroom and drag Blaise inside, locking the door behind her and casting several of her best silencing charms before turning to face her nemesis, aka, the future love of her life.

Judging from his lack of expression, he was about as keen on the idea as she was.

"So," Ginny decided to start the conversation, being as Mother had more or less put her in charge.

"I'm an Avatar to a Goddess," she stated. "What the hell are you?"

Blaise, trained to give nothing away, barely stopped himself from blinking at such a blasé statement of an extraordinary thing.

"Fey," he replied after a short pause. "Son of Ilysan, Grandson of Edrian."

"Edrian?" Ginny's voice squeaked, her blasé attitude flying out the window at the mention of _that _name. "As in _King _Edrian? And Prince Ilysan?"

"Yes."

Ginny, having no formal training beyond face-offs with the twins and her mother, was slightly less adept at hiding her reactions.

"I'm fucked."

Blaise, as attracted as he was to her, sincerely hoped that she didn't mean that literally.

Staring straight into the face of her future, Ginny had the sickening feeling she'd just made a prediction of monumental proportions.

* * *

"Mr. Malfoy," McGonagall broke the blonde's concentration, causing him to turn and face the Professor with a confused expression. "Perhaps you would like to go visit Madame Pomfrey?"

Draco's reaction was immediate, a curling of his lip that reveals more of the too-long canines currently emerging from his mouth.

"What the hell?" Di, who'd stopped arguing with Hermione the moment Professor McGonagall had interrupted their yell-off, craned her head around the older woman to find Draco poking at his teeth with a horrified expression.

_I know the feeling, _she found herself momentarily sympathizing with him before her newfound customary scowl overtook her features.

"We need to get him out of here," Theodore Nott was murmuring to a frowning Professor Snape, the two of them, along with Graham Pritchard and Su Li, effectively blocking the blonde from the view of the general populace.

"Might I suggest my office?" Professor Snape graciously offered, having born witness to Draco's obvious dislike of the infirmary on numerous occasions.

"She comes with." Surprisingly it wasn't Draco who spoke, but Theo, who motioned Di over in an oddly authoritative manner.

"I don't think so," she was quick to state, crossing her arms and scowling harder. "The only way you're going to get me to come with you is by a divine act of God."

"We need to talk."

* * *

Ginny had slipped back into the room, Blaise by her side, just in time to hear Di's proclamation, which made Ginny's statement all the more ironic.

"We can talk later," Di decided, turning her attention to the Gryffindor table and taking a step in its direction.

"_Now._" Ginny hissed, reaching over and grabbing her friends arm, jerking her towards a once more growling Draco.

"Put a cork in it, fang-face," Ginny snapped, thoroughly fed up with the blonde's attitude. "You're coming with. Is the offer for your office still available, Professor?"

Snape didn't know who was more surprised, himself, or Miss Weasley, at her strangely civil tone.

"My office will be fine," Professor Snape agreed, turning in a swirling of robes and leading the odd little party out of the Great Hall.

"Well." Ginny settled herself in one of Snape's conjured chairs and stared wistfully at the comfy recliner in the corner.

"We need to talk." Ginny, Draco, and Hermione all stared at each other in dumbfounded shock as they spoke the same words at the same time.

"Damn straight," came a voice from the doorway, startling all of them.

Theo, who had been slouched on the desk, straightened upright with a snap, Graham echoing his posture as the newcomer entered the room, a grim faced Su Li on his heels.

"Malakai," Theo greeted, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice. "What are you doing here?"

"The Elders sent me," Kai responded, his gaze skimming over the room's occupants with a pensive frown before turning to Su Li.

"Go get the rest of them. Everybody needs to be here for this one."

"Even…" Su Li trailed off, speaking with her eyes. Kai gave her a quick nod of confirmation and she disappeared out the door on cats feet.

"I thought this was just an us issue," Ginny spoke, indicating herself and Di as well as their newly discovered significant others.

"Hardly," Kai snorted, settling himself against the desk where Theo had been, the other boy already having respectfully vacated his place and now stood next to Graham against the wall.

"The Goddess has spoken, yes?" Ginny, who was still having a hard time grasping the whole 'Mother is talking to you' thing, could only stare in surprise as the simple statement emerged from the newbies lips.

"Who _are_ you?" Hermione spoke for all of them. She'd been included in this meeting for the fact that she had far more intimate knowledge of Veela's than even Veela Draco did. Snape, not wanting to have to explain the issues that came with Di and Draco 'fighting' had vacated the premises after discovering the source of the discord between them.

"Malakai of the Red Claw clan."

"Red Claw?" Draco straightened abruptly. Next to him, Blaise, too, was sitting spine fully erect as he stared at someone who wasn't supposed to exist.

"You're supposed to be dead," surprising all of them, it was Di who spoke, staring at them like she'd just witnessed the second coming.

"Rumors of our destruction were greatly exaggerated," was his dry response.

Ginny was silent. She was thinking, mostly that this whole situation was really starting to freak her out. Also, that accepting this mantle of the Goddess thing was starting to look less and less like an adventure and more and more like an unfortunate burden.

Dead shapeshifters being not so dead? Heir to the Fey throne as a mate? Best friend mated to a Veela?

"Who else is supposed to be here?" Was the question she asked, though, Kai and Su Li's exchange from earlier catching up with her at a perfect time. She wasn't sure she liked the turn her thoughts had taken.

"The others," Kai responded, his lips twitching as Ginny narrowed her eyes and glared.

"I like her," he stated conversationally to Theo, who was valiantly trying to keep a straight face as the red head proceeded to out-do most shifters and _growl._

"She's something," he finally agreed, holding up his hands to ward off an impending attack as Blaise turned his head to glare at him.

"Not my something," he hastily added, his sensitive ears picking up the tell tale foot treads of the others.

A very confused Harry came traipsing into the room, an oddly calm Ron on his heals. Behind him came a too cheerful Daphne, a frowning Pansy, and a pale faced Luna, whose eyes lit up happily as she spotted Theo and immediately made her way over.

Kai frowned as his gaze scanned over them.

"We're missing people."

"These are the one's we were informed of," Theo answered, frowning as he hugged Luna close to his side.

"Someone isn't talking, then," Kai replied, arms crossed as his gaze once more swept the room.

"Hel-_lo_," Daphne waved her hand in the air, drawing his attention to her and causing him to blink once as something swept through him. "Anybody gonna tell us what's going on?"

Daphne played dumb as to the meaning of the heat that suddenly slammed it's way up her spine, expertly hiding her reaction behind _years_ of playing dumb. The unidentified male narrowed his eyes at her, but she wasn't intimidated. Blinking her baby blues, she did her best 'impatient sociopath' routine.

"Potions starts in ten," she continued on. "Things to stab, slice, and dice. Sharp, pointy objects to handle and possible death to brew."

Her expression took on a dreamy cast that had Harry, who happened to be sitting closest to her, edging away, closer to Pansy, who frowned at his sudden invasion of her space, but let it go when she caught sight of the far away gleam in Daphne's eyes.

It went against her Slytherin nature to admit fear, but sometimes, despite years of friendship, Daphne scared even her.

"You've been chosen," Kai answered her first question, his gaze never leaving hers, the glint in his eye making it clear that he wasn't fooled in the least but her act.

Daphne grinned in response.

"Chosen?" Ron spoke and there was something in the way he said the word that had all eyes turning to him.

"By Mother," Kai continued on. "To lead in the coming war."

"Against Voldemort?" Harry figured after years of foiling the snakey bastards attempts to kill him and his friends they were at least on first name basis.

Granted, though, Voldemort's real name was Tom Riddle. But very few people seemed to be aware of this fact, so saying 'Against Tom' would probably have garnered him a few odd stares, especially considering the most well known Tom was the innkeeper at the Leaky Cauldron.

Harry could picture going to war with him clearly in his minds eye.

"Six sickles a night."

"We're here to take over."

"Still six sickles a night."

Short of killing him, the war would be won by paying six sickles a night.

Somehow, Harry couldn't quite picture a war with Tom Riddle having quite the same result.

"Against Ahriman."

There was a long moment of silence as they all sat there and processed this.

"_Who_?" Di, who wasn't stupid and recognized that there was some weight to what Kai was saying nevertheless, had no idea what he was going on about.

Even Hermione looked completely mystified.

"Primordial malevolence? Destruction incarnate? The root of all evil?" Kai, who been raised his whole life on stories of Ahriman, found it surprising that no one else seemed to know what was going on.

"Didn't your mothers tell you stories about the last time Ahriman engulfed the Earth?"

"Last time? There was a last time?" Ginny looked perplexed and a little bit angry. "Why can't they just do what they did last time and fix it this time?"

"They are," Kai gave the room a droll look.

"Wait, you mean us? We're supposed to save the world?" Surprisingly, it was Harry who spoke. Having the most experience with saving people, his eyes nevertheless glazed over a little bit at the prospect of having to save the world.

"Oh, suck it up, Potter," Pansy scoffed. "You save people all the time."

"Yeah, people, as in a group, not as in the _whole bloody fucking world!_"

"Stow the hissy fit," Kai ordered crossly. "We don't have time for it."

"I was _not _having a _fit_," Harry retorted with a huff, slumping back in his seat, completely forgetting his desire to not touch Daphne as his arm brushed hers.

And burst into flames.

"_GEEZUS!_" Ginny screeched, startling Blaise, who reacted without thought, tackling her to the ground, the two of them disappearing as the chair tumbled backwards taking the two of them with it.

"I'm on _fire_. I'm on _bloody _FIRE!" Harry screeched, jumping to his feet.

"Stop drop and roll," Su Li called from her corner, a faintly grinning Graham leaning against the wall and enjoying the show.

Draco had already snatched Di from her spot next to him, shoving her behind him with a hiss.

Theo had shoved Luna similarly behind him, but a quick sniff of the air assured him the danger seemed to be specific to Harry, so Luna was allowed to duck around him, her blue eyes curious and vaguely alarmed.

Ron was swearing up a blue streak, yanking an afghan from a nearby chair and frantically trying to beat it out.

Kai's eyebrows skyrocketed, Pansy jumped from her seat, and Daphne's jaw dropped in all out shock.

And, of course, Hermione cast the spell to put the fire out.

"What. The. Hell." Harry spoke after a moment of gazing at his formerly burning arm in numb shock. His eyes traveled the room before landing on Daphne, who was still gaping at him.

Moved beyond the current and into the realm of purely pissed, Harry completely missed the significance of her expression as he morphed from numb to completely livid in three seconds flat.

"You _crazy _BINT!" He snarled, throwing himself at the blonde who reacted just a scant second too late.

_Being taken to the ground by a man was usually a lot more fun than this, _Daphne thought with bemused shock as her muscles instinctively reacted.

Harry was befuddled and bewildered. One second he was on top of her, the next the pint sized blonde was kneeling on his chest with a knife held to his neck a scant centimeter from his skin.

"Don't. Move." Daphne ordered with a white slash of teeth bared in a cold smile.

Wisely, Harry didn't move.

He didn't even breath.

"I wouldn't," Kai warned as wands were drawn in preparation for defense of friends. The warning was primarily directed at the Slytherins and Ron, but mostly Ron.

Ginny was too busy scrapping with Blaise, who was all but sitting on her as he peered over his shoulder to take in the action. Draco was trying, quite successfully, to maintain a grip on his wand as Di made several valiant attempts to bash his skull in with one of Snape's thicker books.

Luna was frowning at Daphne and Harry, a little thought wrinkle between her eyes as she puzzled over this new puzzling addition to her life. Her eyes raised long enough to connect with Theo's, who gave her a slide nod to indicate the correctness of the assumption she had obviously just arrived at.

The thought wrinkle cleared and she blinked in surprise.

"Really?" She spoke, airy voice surprisingly solid in the moment.

"Really," Theo answered with a faint smile.

"Huh," Luna returned her gaze to Harry and Daphne, the latter of whom was starting to turn purple from lack of oxygen.

"Oh for Merlin's sake, Ranger, get off of him. He's harmless."

Harry wasted what little of his precious oxygen he had left to make a noise of outrage. No guy, least of all a teenager, liked to be referred to as _harmless._

"Ranger?" Pansy asked, her voice tight, the word familiar enough to have her regarding her best friend with thin lips and a _slightly _angry expression.

"We prefer the term Phalanx," Daphne responded, rising with unusual grace, the knife hanging loosely by her side but firmly grasped in her hand.

"We?"

Blaise, having determine that Daphne, despite her surprising speed, was not a threat to Ginny, was climbing to his feet, helping the scowling red head up after him as they waited for her to answer his question.

"My people," Daphne replied airily, waving the knife with careless ease. "What? Did you think you two were the only non-humans in our midst?"

Blaise and Draco's looks of blank faced surprised made it obvious that that had been _exactly _what they were thinking.

"Sorry to break it to you, boys, but with the exception of Pansy, nobody in this room is completely human."


	6. Chapter 6

"With the exception of me?" Pansy blinked in surprise.

"I'm not human?" Was Hermione's outraged question. "I look human," she glanced down at the rest of her as if double checking that point.

"We all look human," Kai drawled from where he was still leaning against the desk.

"Wait a second," Ron stared with suspicious eyes at the rest of the room. "If we're not human, then what exactly are we?"

"A lot of things," Kai replied, uncrossing his arms and pushing away from the desk as he pointed.

"Daphne, as you all know, is a Ranger." The blonde tensed, her eyes narrowing.

"Oh, I'm sorry, a _Phalanx_." Sarcasm coated the words quite liberally, but the blonde seemed satisfied with the correction.

"I am a Shifter, as are Theo, Su, and Graham," he indicted the appropriate personages.

"Blaise is half fey, son of Ilysan, heir to the Sidhe throne. Draco is Veela, great-grandson of Roshwen, High Queen of the Veela," Kai moved his finger to Hermione next, but Draco interrupted everyone.

"I'm royalty?" He perked up at the thought. "Seriously?"

Everyone reacted about the same, with eye rolls and murmured expletives directed at Draco's cumbersome ego.

"As I was say, Draco's the grandson of the High Queen of the Veela, which is a _matriarchal _society."

"Huh?"

"It's ruled by women," Hermione clarified with a snicker. Draco's smug expression dissipated into a scowl. Opening his mouth to comment, he quickly snapped it shut with an audible click as Di leveled him with a glare and Daphne smiled serenely while she flipped her knife and caught it by the hilt in mid twirl.

"Continuing on, Luna is a descendant of the _Morae_, otherwise known as the fates, as is Miss Granger," he tilted his head towards the ginger haired female, who blinked in surprise.

"But that doesn't…" she trailed off as the rest of the room turned to look at her, some glaring, all impatient, eagerly awaiting for Kai to finish his introductions.

"The Weasley family, as well as the Prewetts, are descendants of the Druii, long hidden," there was a special significance to the way he said those last two words that had Ron narrowing his eyes thoughtfully, but forgoing commentary, curious to see what else Kai had to say.

"And Harry Potter is – "

"The Boy-Who-Lived, Savior of the wizarding world, O great and powerful slayer of dark lords, etcetera, etcetera," Harry droned on, his expression dull from where he sat on the floor, leaning against the wall.

"Aren't we full of ourselves?" Draco sneered down at him, craning to see the boy from over the length of his mates body and the back of the sofa they were occupying.

Harry gave him a one fingered greeting that had Draco's lips curling and Di snickering.

"Yes, all of those things, but you are also the future King of the Night."

Dead silence as Daphne jerked upright, eyes wide once more in surprise.

"But I thought…" she trailed off, snapping her jaw shut and shaking her head, shooting Kai a narrow eyed look.

"You and me, buddy, we're gonna have words later." Kai arched an eyebrow in response.

"Do you ever do anything else?" Ginny broke in, referencing his eyebrow arching tendencies. Her brain had tried frantically to process everything Kai was saying at a rapid fire rate but had given up sometime after Kai had told them Hermione wasn't human.

The poor girl looked completely lost, barely realizing Ron was holding her hand, doing his thick-headed best to be supportive.

_Come to think of it…_her eyes narrowed as she studied Ron a little bit closer.

Sure, he seemed surprised at the idea that Harry was going to be the next lord of darkness, apparently, but the rest of it, specifically the part related to the Weasley's and the Prewett's….

"No, no, _no _and _NO_!" Harry practically yelled as he sprang to his feet, finger pointed at Kai in a manner that made it seem like a warning.

"I am _NOT_ going to turn out evil! I don't care about linking scars or similar past histories. No way in _hell _am I turning out like that…that…_monster._" Harry hissed the last part so well Ginny could have sworn he'd slipped into Parsteltongue for a moment, but comprehension had yet to elude her, so she figured Harry was just very, very pissed.

"I never said anything about evil," Kai stated mildly, his hands crossed over his chest as he regarded the other boy with thinly veiled amusement.

"You said I was going to be future King of the Night. How is that _not _evil?"

"It's not about power, Harry," Daphne surprised all of them by speaking. She hesitated a moment, rethinking her last sentence with a wrinkled nose.

"Okay, so it _is _about power, but not in the way you think. Do you know what being King of the Night entails?"

Harry gave her a look of such profound disbelief that Daphne actually winced at her own stupidity.

"Right, obviously not. Help?" She looked first to Kai, then to the other shifters, her gaze coming to rest on Luna's, who obediently explained.

"You're a vampire, Harry."

The ones who hadn't figured it out, which was pretty much everybody except the shifters, were gaping alternately between the dumbstruck Harry and the pleasant faced blonde.

"A born vampire, if I'm not mistaken, since you're still aging."

"Vampire?" Harry's voice was faint, and the blood had all but drained from his face. "I think I need to sit down."

He was so unfocused he nearly squished Hermione, whose startled yelp at finding herself with a lapful of a very discombobulated Harry Potter, startled Ron from his contemplative frown long enough to give Harry a not so gentle shove to the side and off his girlfriend.

"It's not a bad thing, Harry," Luna was explaining. Daphne would have been a better choice, but judging from the way he was reacting to Luna telling him these things, he probably would have made another attempt on Daphne's life should she continue to try and explain.

"My parents?" Harry raised his surprisingly clear gaze to settle on the blue eyed blonde. "Were they…"

"Vampires?" Luna finished helpfully. "Doubtful."

"But you just said I was a born vampire," Harry pointed out, once more confused. And he wasn't the only one.

"A vampiric bloodline is a tricky thing," Daphne picked up the explanation here, since this was, after all, one of her areas of expertise.

"Sometimes when vampires mate, they take humans as their other. And sometimes they have human babies, instead of vampires."

"Aren't they technically half and half?" Logic minded Hermione decided to make a reappearance, but Daphne was shaking her head.

"Never. There is no such thing as a half breed in vampire society. You either are or you aren't. But that doesn't mean their human children are discounted. Sometimes a human child of vampires will give birth to a vampire baby. And sometimes it takes several generations of human babies before a vampire baby is born."

"So my parents were human?" There was an immeasurable amount of relief in Harry's tone.

"Yes," Kai interrupted here. "It was several generations back, before the Great Wars, when a Melina Potter and Chaska Shade had a human child named Charlus Potter."

"Potter? Shouldn't his last name have been Shade?"

Kai shook his head at Draco's question.

"Shade isn't a surname. It's a clan name, of sorts. When vampires mate with humans, their children, if human, take on the surname of the human parent and, if vampire, the clan name of the vampiric parent."

Hermione was nodding. It made sense, at least in her mind. Ron still looked a bit confused, but there was nothing new about that. Obligingly she gave his hand a comforting pat, which had him giving her a strange look. She smiled to let him know it was alright. She wasn't going to marry him someday for his brain, after all. She kind of liked him a bit slow.

Ron was confused as to why Hermione was suddenly smiling at him so fondly, but now was hardly the time to question her on it. So he gave her a cheesy smile in return and returned his attention to Kai.

"So back to the whole Future King of the Night deal. How, exactly, did Harry come about that honor?"

"We're not sure." Harry blinked at that.

"Come again?"

"Nobody is sure how Harry came about that honor," Kai stated, his fingers tapping against the desk as he studied the dark haired boy with a faint frown.

"Are you serious?" Draco spoke, surprisingly all of them into looking at him. Normally he enjoyed being the central focus of others attentions, but right now he felt the need to point out the one blindingly obvious fact that everyone seemed to be missing.

"He's Harry _bleeding _Potter. He's the bloody fucking boy-who-lived. He's got power in spades. He killed the freakin' Dark Lord when he was _one. _Why _wouldn't _he be the next King of the Night?"

Everybody was gaping at Draco's somewhat backhanded compliment. The blonde had almost sounded like he was _promoting _Harry for a moment.

"He does have a point," Theo felt the need to point out.

"Indeed." Kai frowned thoughtfully at the wall. "It could be a mitigating factor."

Pansy, who had been keeping track of everyone's genetics quirks with a singular focus, let her eyes fall on the sole remaining unnamed party in the room.

"What about Whitmore? What is she?" Kai actually hesitated before answering, his eyes taking in Di with a reverent sort of gleam that had Draco shifting subtly to insert his body between hers and the others.

He got a slap upside the head for his troubles, and another deep, near loathing scowl from the brunette.

"Whitemore is Draco's mate," Kai stated slowly, drawing a snort from the girl in question, along with a mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like _'Not if I kill him first'_ that had the others grinning as Draco pouted.

"And?" Pansy prompted, eyes fixated on the shifter. "You said everybody in this room except me wasn't entirely human. What is she?" She repeated.

"Actually, Daphne was the one who said that," Kai pointed out, mostly as a stall. He really, _really _didn't want to have to explain Di's quirk, especially after witnessing her surprisingly high level of violence towards men.

Granted, it was Draco, who, after meeting for the first time, Kai could fully comprehend the desire to strangle and maim.

Still, it was uncharacteristic of him to hesitate.

"You're stalling," Di pointed out with narrowed eyes, Kai her central focus at the moment. "Why are you stalling? It can't be worse than Harry's. Can it?"

She peered around the room, suddenly worried. She couldn't think of anything worse than being a bloodsucking vampire, but give her imagination a moment.

"Oh," she suddenly moaned, eyes wide. "I'm a demon, aren't I? Oh, Merlin, Ginny, I'm a fucking demon. Quick!" She ordered, jumping to her feet and peering around the room frantically. "Hide the religious articles!"

She stepped forward only to find herself yanked backwards by a grinning Draco.

"You're not a demon," he assured her, wrapping her in his arms and cuddling her to him.

"I'm not?" There was an odd mixture of hope and doubt in her voice with those two words.

"You're not," Draco confirmed, burying his nose in the crease between her neck and shoulder and inhaling deeply. "You smell too good and you're too pretty."

"Uh, thanks?" Di was confused by nice Draco. It was…creepy as hell.

"Your mate is correct," Kai stated, forcibly stopping his table tapping which had reached a speed that had Hermione gawking. Even Daphne had looked impressed.

"You aren't a demon," Kai inhaled quickly before letting his next statement carry out on the exhale. "You're a demigod."

Another long moment of silence followed.

"Say _what_?"

* * *

Cobe Hanson was tired.

Scratch that. He was fucking _exhausted_.

He had traveled the muggle way to London, reacting quite poorly to both the shaking airplane and the sudden time change.

Now, his body was telling him it was time to go to sleep and his watch was telling him good morning.

Literally.

"Fucker," he swore, giving the evil thing one hard shake to shut it up. He'd garnered some unusual looks when the thing had started screaming at him with undisguised joy that seemed to come with daylight.

"I will burn you," he swore for the umpteenth time, giving the damn thing another shake.

"Wouldn't help," it replied smugly. "I'll just come back to haunt you."

Like it did last time. And the time before that. And the time before that.

"Next time I see Tavis, he's a dead man."

Tavis Brooke had given him the watch for his last birthday. The fox (literally) had then left town, heading up to Alaska for a six month study in ancient tribal magics of the natives.

And now Cobe was here, which meant that he was going to have to wait an unnamed amount of time longer for his revenge.

Which totally sucked, but what could he do? The Elders called and he answered.

"Hanson?" Cobe had already scented the wolf, so he did little more than turn to face him in reaction.

Tall and sturdy, with a wild mane of snow white hair interspersed with darker streaks of gray. He had a faint goatee, bushy eyebrows, and was chewing on a toothpick.

The toothpick caught him by surprise.

"You Hanson?" The man repeated, rudely and somewhat short tempered.

"Yeah," Cobe replied cautiously. One look at the man had assured Cobe of two things: first, he was obviously American and obviously from Texas if the Stetson on his head and thick southern drawl in combination with the toothpick and attitude were anything to go by.

And second, that this guy was definitely not the kind of guy you wanted to piss off. He looked mean as a snake.

Which, considering who Cobe was, was saying something.

Cobe could actually _be _as mean as a snake.

The dude grunted, maneuvering the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other as he stared at Cobe with displeasure.

"Follow me," he stated, turning on his heel and disappearing into the crowd.

Cobe followed with an angry hiss, hitching his duffel higher on his shoulder as he let his tongue dart out of his mouth, tasting the air, tracking the other man.

It took him fifteen minutes of traveling through the muck and ruin that was the airport to find the man outside, leaning negligently against one of the pillers.

His eyes drifted to his watch and he made a noise in the back of his throat as he pushed away from his support system and started walking.

"Fifteen minutes, not bad. The records thirteen thirty-eight. Close."

"But not close enough," Cobe stated, taking a gamble he was pretty sure was going to pay off.

The man grunted again, leading him to a severely out of place 1983 GMC Sierra truck.

"They let you bring this into the country?" slipped past his lips before Cobe could stop it.

"Let me?" The man let out a hoarse, low rumbling laugh as he jerked himself up the side step and into the drivers seat. "Son, they don't let me do nothin'. As far as the law abiding citizens of the world are concerned, this just happens to be an unusually large suburban."

Magic. Right.

He'd forgotten.

Which was stupid, considering his destination.

"So," he spoke into the silence, violating about twenty different kinds of protocols between shifters, but jet lagged and just plain worn down, he wasn't flaunting his reputation, he was just too fucking tired to care.

"What can I expect?"

It was a first, and more than likely a last, watching his yet unnamed companion blink in surprise.

"They didn't tell you?"

"Were they supposed to?" It was a point of confusion, and another frustration in his life.

He'd killed his clan leader when he was fifteen. They'd found a new Nigishdu since, but Cobe…

Cobe was the snake in the grass, now. He'd left before they could exile him, but his chances of returning to his homeland were slim to none.

Very few people would welcome him with open arms despite what he had done for them, for _all _of _them_.

The Council had taken him in, giving him direction and purpose. He was powerful, he couldn't be ignored, he knew that, but still, he felt that some of the things they had done for him went above and beyond.

They'd found him a home with a family of werefoxes who'd been more than happy to welcome him amongst their midst.

They were an oddity, adopting strays from other clans. There had been a werebear, a werewolf, and a werebison there, all teenagers, all exiles for various reasons.

Hector, the werebear, had been kicked out for being gay. It was such a normal problem, Cobe had actually been pissed beyond belief when he found out.

"That's it?" He'd asked, staring at Hector with eyes wide in horror. Judging from the way the other boy had ducked his head and tensed, he'd been preparing for the worst, an attack and possibly death at the fangs of a snake.

"Yes?" Had been his hesitant reply. Cobe had shaken his head, shocked at the basic cruelty of man.

"Unbelievable." Once Hector had realized Cobe wasn't going to hurt him, the two had become fast friends.

The werewolf, Monica, was Touched, meaning she saw beyond this world and into another. Sometimes it was impossible for her to differentiate between the two and rather than dealing with it, her clan had set her loose.

It had been damn irresponsible of them and the Council had ensured they paid dearly for the oversight.

Vance, the werebison, had been huge. Cobe, at six three, was no slouch in the height department, but Vance…the kid had been well over seven feet tall and only twelve years old.

He was just too big.

_Unnatural_, his clan had hissed, perturbed by it.

Cobe and Vance related the best out of all of them. They had both been exiled for similar reasons, after all.

Vance, thankfully, had stopped growing before he reached the eight foot mark, but spent most of his time at the ranch because he was still the biggest person around, thereby making him by default the scariest.

"Goddamn yes," the man swore, throwing the truck into gear and squealing rubber against asphalt as they barely missed taking out a Mini Cooper.

_Fucking Texans_, Cobe swore vehemently and silently to himself. He'd ridden with Texans before and every time he always swore it would be his last. They drove big trucks too fast, took corners too sharply, and paid little to no attention to traffic signs.

They were his waking nightmare, and considering some of the things he'd seen in his seventeen years, that was saying something.

* * *

"Demigod? _Demigod?_" Di's voice was reaching new levels of shriek as she agitatedly paced the room. Draco had relinquished his hold after her first violent flinging of limbs and sat back on the couch, sulking but with equally agitated eyes as they tracked her movements.

"I knew she wasn't going to take it well," Kai stated conversationally to Theo, who was watching the pacing with one arm slung over Luna's shoulders.

"Take it well? Take _IT well_?" Di whirled on him with angry eyes and flung up hands, her expression borderline psychotic as she rounded in on the suddenly pale faced trio.

"Di," Ginny swooped in to rescue them all, ignoring Blaise's hand on her arm attempting to act as a restraint. Di was a lot of things, but a best friend killer wasn't one of them.

Ginny would know; there were numerous times over the course of their odd little friendship that she had not only done things that would have garnered her a death sentence from other friends, but she'd also put the tools to carry out that death sentence in Di's hands and Di hadn't tried. Not once.

Though there was a frog out there who's real name was Teddy and whose family probably missed him very much…

"You need to be calm and rational."

"Rationality is for squares!" Di shot back completely nonsensically as she continued to pace before coming to an abrupt stop in front of her friend.

"What am I going to do, Ginny?" The lost expression on her face coupled with the absolute despair in her voice had Draco wrapping her in his arms within seconds. Surprisingly – at least to everyone in the room – she let him.

"Nothing," Ginny decided with a nod of her head, crossing her arms and shrugging off Blaise's unwanted grip with an annoyed look.

"Nothing?" Di blinked at Ginny.

"Nothing," Ginny confirmed with a decisive nod. "This doesn't change anything."

"It doesn't?"

"Nope," Ginny motioned to the room in general. "All of us are still the same people we were ten minutes ago."

"We are?"

Di's hope was better than her despair. It was a step in the right direction, at the very least.

"We are," Ginny nodded again before turning to Kai.

"So," she stated, leaning back against Blaise more to make and point and because he happened to be there rather than because she actually _wanted _to.

"So," it was Kai's turn to parrot back to her, only he wasn't doing it out of emotional trauma. No, he was just being a jackass. Ginny narrowed her eyes and glared at him, but before she could speak, Daphne beat her to the punch.

"What the hell is going on?"

* * *

Cobe stared at the man in front of him. The man in front of him stared back.

"This the kid?" He asked Cobe's former chaperone, a guy named Chuck. Just Chuck. After he'd introduced himself, Cobe had literally had to bite his lips to keep from cracking up.

"Yep." Chuck chewed on a new toothpick as the two of them – him and the stranger – stood side by side and surveyed Cobe head to toe.

Cobe endured their gazes primarily because this was their territory and not his and it was considered respectful to not tell Alpha's what to do on their home turf.

He also let it be because there was a really pretty girl standing a ways beyond the two of them who had an ass straight from heaven itself.

"Boy," Chuck barked, drawing Cobe's attention back to him with a startled blink. "Don't go ogling the woman folk. Makes people testy."

"Right." Women were precious in Shifter society. Females mates were protected a cherished to the point of being smothered with affection. Male mates were hostile and out and out vicious to anybody and everybody they perceived as a threat.

"Can't have another incident like May Day." Both men shuddered at that, their eyes taking on that far away gleam.

"The fighting…the carnage…red dripping everywhere…" New Guy shuddered while Chuck closed his eyes.

"That's my Maybelle for you," he offered as an explanation, his voice dry. "Ain't nobody gonna grab her ass and not pay for it."

"She packs one hell of a punch," the other guy agreed solemnly.

_A girl?_ They were that freaked out by a _girl_?

Cobe was all for equal rights and all that shit, but…_a _girl_? Seriously?_

"Right," Chuck snapped the other guy out of wherever he had gone mentally by clapping none-too-gently on the shoulder and pointing to Cobe.

"Tex, this is Cobe. Cobe, this is Tex. He's Alpha of the Jackal Clan."

Jackal's. Even as he shook the Alpha's hand – a high sign of respect, since most Alpha's require those beneath them to kiss the dirt, literally – he tried to scrounge up what little he knew about Jackals and came up annoyingly blank except for one little tidbit: they liked to eat snakes.

Cobe didn't feel a particular kinship towards his fellow ground crawlers – snakes weren't very communal. Back home, they'd lived together more for survival than a desire for companionship. Snakes usually grouped up a couple of times a year for breeding purposes, but aside from that, they were pretty cold blooded and anti-social.

Nevertheless, it was the principle of the matter that had him making the handshake short and sweet, especially since Tex was grinning rather _maniacally _at him, almost as if he'd read his mind.

"Hey," Tex greeted him. Surprisingly, despite the name, Tex was obviously a local. "I've been assigned with your transportation to Hogwarts."

"I'm not going to be flying on a broomstick, am I?" The look Tex and Chuck exchanged did not bode well.

But seriously, what were they expecting? A miracle? Cobe had gotten tasked with this assignment not because of his competency but because of his youth. They needed child soldiers and quite frankly they were in short supply. And it was always strictly voluntary, which made them in even shorter supply.

"No broomstick," Tex stated with upward tilted lips as he pulled something from his pocket. "Toothpick?"

"Thanks," Cobe accepted the sliver of wood with a suspicious look directed towards Tex and Chucks wide grins.

"No problem," Tex replied, shoving the rest of the toothpicks in his pocket before pulling out what looked to be a long stick out of his pocket.

"Have a nice trip," he stated quite pleasantly before tapping the end of the stick to the end of the toothpick.

Cobe had just a moment to think _'Motherfu-'_ before his entire being was suddenly grabbed by the belly button and _pulled_.

* * *

Severus Snape was used to dealing with children in all shapes and all forms.

He just wasn't used to having them drop in on him.

Literally.

Years of spying coupled with his own naturally excellent reflexes had him both drawing his wand and curbing the spell on his lips when the rumpled mass rolled onto his back and wheezed.

"Motherfucker," he muttered peevishly as he glared up at the sky.

"Indeed." It was an odd echo of Snapes original thought when a human body suddenly hurled itself at his head.

The boy on the ground twisted his head slightly to blink up at Snape.

"You're not gonna hand me a toothpick, too, are you?"

"No." Succinct and to the point, though in actuality Snape was both bemused and puzzled.

A toothpick?

"Good," the kid sat upright with a faint groan before pushing himself to his feet and dusting of his pants before offering Snape his hand.

"Cobe Hanson. I'm the new guy."

Snape eyed the kids dust encrusted hand with an arched eyebrow.

"Oh." The kid followed the direction of his gaze before withdrawing his hand. "Sorry. Forgot."

They stood their in an odd sort of silence just watching each other for a long moment.

"You were expecting me, weren't you?" Cobe hoped like hell they were, cause otherwise…

He'd seen the Blair Witch project – he knew what happened when you sent kids off into the woods all by their lonesome.

"We were expecting you." Snape broke his one word rule as soon as he had a few moments to enjoy the boys nervous expression and frantic glances towards the Forbidden Forest.

Minerva had always told him that teaching was obviously his calling; nobody else she knew could get such a sick thrill out of terrifying young children without sexually molesting them first.

Just the thought had had Snape turning green, which added a distinctly unattractive pallor to his skin.

"So," Cobe clapped his hands together and smiled charmingly at the tall scary man. "You're the welcoming committee."

The boy didn't seem to be afraid, just impatient. And, perhaps, a touch uneasy about their current location.

"Apparently." As entertaining as it was to watch the boy squirm, the Headmaster had left standing orders with the staff; whomever encountered young Mr. Hanson first was to immediately accompany him to Dumbledore's office to be sorted and debriefed.

"Come," Snape ordered, turning on his heal with a dramatic flick of his robes as he moved at an incredibly clipped pace back towards the school.

"He's like the bastard child of Oz and Count Chocula," he heard the child mutter behind him. He had to literally bite the inside of his lip to keep from laughing.

_Count Chocula_? Seriously?

* * *

"The world is ending," Kai repeated with no small amount of annoyance as he settled his ass on the edge of the desk. "Didn't you hear me the first time?"

"It's not the sort of thing people are likely to forget," Luna agreed solemnly, reaching up to twist a lock of hair around her finger only to realize her hair was no longer long enough to do that.

Her hand dropped to her side where it was quickly scooped up by Theo. Turning her head slightly to look him in the face, she found herself smiling again for no reason other than the sight of him.

He returned the smile, raising her hand to his mouth and pressing a gentle kiss to the back of her hand before gently pulling her closer and draping his arms over her shoulders, pulling her back firmly against his front.

Wrapped up in a warm glow, Luna turned her attention back to the rest of the room only to find that everybody's attention was, well, on _her_.

"What?" Theo asked, his grip tightening on Luna as he gazed at the rest of the room with equal parts confusion, alarm, and lazy contentment.

"Nothing…" Graham was the first to state before trailing off, obviously unsure how to proceed.

"It's just…" Su Li picked up next, her mouth opened slightly and her eyes crinkling as she fought to come up with something. Her eyes rolled over to Graham, the two of them communicating silently with their eyes for a long moment, but the words still didn't come.

"What the hell is up with you two?" Ginny broke the silence. It was rude as hell, she knew, but seriously…it wasn't like everybody else hadn't been thinking the exact same thing.

Well, except for the Shifters, maybe. Mostly they looked…_envious._

She could feel Blaise at her back, a strong solid pillar of warmth. He was steady and while she'd be hard pressed to confess strong feelings of love or even like, she was undoubtedly attracted to him.

But Luna and Theo…

It was freaky. Three days ago, she never would have put their names in the same sentence, let alone believe the two of them were together.

And now, they looked so in love that she, Ginny Weasley, who had six brothers and grew up on Quidditch and backyard wrestling, actually wanted to _swoon_.

"They're mates," Kai informed them, his attention elsewhere as his head turned towards the door, a small frown forming. "That's how mates act."

"Mates?" Pansy asked, leaning back on the couch and kicking her legs out in front of her, ignoring Harry's startled yelp as one of her leather clad shoes made contact with his leg.

Giving the spicy brunette a hostile look, Harry rubbed his bruised thigh as he turned his attention towards Kai, who still had his head turned towards the door.

"Shifters mate for life," Theo explained when it became apparent that Kai was otherwise occupied.

"For life?" Ron blinked at them. "Like marriage?"

"Only more permanent," Daphne jumped in, startling all of them.

"What?" She asked, shrugging under their collective scrutiny. "Phalanx here; it's sort of my job to know these things."

"All the better to kill you with, my dear?" Graham shot back dryly.

"Something like that," Daphne agreed with an equally humorous smile.

"Whoa, wait. Killing? Who said anything about killing? And what does that have to do with mating?" Di had been placidly sitting in the circle of Draco's arms, surprising the whole lot of them by her temporary calmness, but now she was back to her feet, pacing _away _from Daphne, who she was eyeing like the devil incarnate.

"Relax, _demigod_," Daphne rolled her eyes as Di's nervous-nelly routine. "You're off the menu."

"Oh, good. Great. Why?" Relief morphed to suspicion in an instant as Di bent over slightly to peer more closely at Daphne. "Am I suddenly not good enough to be on your hit list anymore?"

"Who said anything about a hit list?" Ginny was watching the proverbially tennis ball of a conversation between Di and Daphne with a nagging suspicion that her best mate was just about done in if not for the week, then definitely for the day.

"There's no hit list," Daphne snapped at Ginny, suddenly annoyed by the vaguely hostile and openly suspicious looks she was receiving from throughout the room. The Gryffindors she could handle, but Draco's edging closer to his mate, and Blaise's tight expression with a hint of distrust…that hurt.

"I hardly ever kill people." That did little to reassure the suspicious parties and Ron was suddenly edging his way between Hermione and the blonde.

"_Ouch_!" Ron rubbed the back of his head, turning to look at a scowling Hermione over his shoulder. "What the hell was that for?"

"For being an idiot," Hermione snapped peevishly, crossing her arms as she turned to face the blonde.

"Why is mating significant with Shifters?" Hermione had a way of getting right the heart of an issue and Daphne actually found herself giving the ginger-haired girl a smile of genuine gratitude in response.

"Shifters mate for life," Theo expertly inserted himself back into the conversation. "If one mate dies, so does the other."

"Like from heartbreak?" Blaise narrowed his eyes at the back of his mates head. Didn't her voice sound just a bit _wistful_?

Draco grinned at him from over Di's head and he responded by cocking an eyebrow and giving the brunette – who was slapping at Draco's hand as it snaked its way around her waist – a pointed nod.

Draco's grin dropped and he scowled at the not-so-subtle reminder of his own mates lack of fondness.

Meanwhile, largely oblivious to the Slytherin's silent communication, Ginny was chewing on her bottom lip and having a total girly moment as she stared, a bit misty eyed, at Theo and Luna, who were doing the whole 'look into my eyes' bit again.

"More than that," Theo reached up and tucked a stray strand of hair behind Luna's ear, his expression serious and his eyes locked with hers as he spoke to the room at large.

"When you look into their eyes, you don't see color or your reflection; you see eternity and suddenly…" Theo cupped Luna's jaw with a gentle hand, "…you're no longer alone in it."

A straight statement, so profound in its simplicity that the meaning and depth of it elicited a hushed response from the room.

Ron had been watching Hermione watch the other couple as Theo spoke, the other boys words resounding pure and true, echoing every feeling he'd ever had towards his favorite bookworm.

He gave her hand a small squeeze, meeting her gaze dead on as she turned to look at him.

Hermione, for her part, was not expecting the depth of emotion she saw in Ron's eyes. She knew she loved him and he loved her, but up until that moment, it had been an everyday kind of love. The kind of love that young couples everywhere seemed to thrive off of.

But this, this went deeper. It went beyond what was good and loving and straight into the realm of the soul.

Her mouth parted, suddenly dry as the Sahara as she sat there, absolutely gobsmacked with the realization that she wasn't just staring into the eyes of the love of her life – she was looking at her soulmate.

Draco eyed the misty eyed females throughout the room, shifting uncomfortably under the sudden influx of estrogen. He could actually _smell _it, wafting in waves that were starting to make him a bit teary eyed.

Cocking his head to the side slightly to determine if the rest of the males were having the same problem, he was a bit surprised by what he saw.

Granger and the eldest Weasley were having a silent communication thing with their eyes, which wasn't all that surprising. Su Li and Graham were watching Theo and Luna with what could only be described as looks of longing.

Their fearless leader was staring at Daphne, eyebrow cocked, while the blonde gave as good as she got.

Potter was studying the ceiling, arms propped up on bended knees, his mouth moving. It took Draco a few seconds, but he couldn't hold back a completely undignified snort when he realized Harry was counting ceiling stones.

Pansy one upped him, giving the dark-haired boy another swift quick that had him hissing, turning on the equally dark haired girl with lips curled back in an angry hiss.

Pansy crossed her arms and rolled her eyes in the face of his anger, arching an eyebrow as if challenging him '_Is that the best you can do_?'

The boy-who-lived's lips curled upward in a positively Slytherin smirk that promised nothing good and Pansy's own lips were quick to echo the gesture.

Turning from them and fixing the sole remaining Slytherin in his sights, Draco blinked in surprise at Blaise's expression.

The older boy looked contemplative, which wasn't news in and of itself, but the fact that he wore the expression while watching Ginny Weasley was new.

Ginny stared right back, equally thoughtful. They were like two wolves, sizing each other up to see which one would look away first.

With any other individual, Draco would bet money on Blaise hands down. But he'd seen the red-head in action. She could be pretty damn stubborn when she wanted to be. Not unlike a certain somebody else he knew.

Di had conducted her own perusal of the room while Draco had been doing his, and her conclusions were pretty much in line with her mates.

Her gaze moved to him, sliding up his jaw to meet his focus dead on.

He eyed her with a truly odd mixture of absolute devotion and outright wariness. She returned the wariness in spades, but she wasn't entirely sure about the devotion.

Supposedly Draco was her everything, the one true love above all others to which normal people aspired.

Right now, though, she was struggling with the idea of having a boyfriend. It was a new experience for her, one she wasn't even sure was actually an experience because he hadn't even _asked her out _yet.

Draco wanted to rip his hair out in absolute frustration as his mates expression morphed from one of morbid curiosity to outright hostility in a few seconds flat. Smelling the irritation coming off of her in waves, he actually reached up to give his perfectly coiffed locks an irritated tug as he struggled with his memory for a _reason _for her hostility – this time.

"Heads up, folks," Kai broke the silence, shooting the persnickety blonde one last knowing look before swinging his head towards the doorway.

"We've got company."


End file.
